Is time a product of the
universe and built into
the intricacy of matter itself?

Is time a human construction:
a way of measuring the perception
of change that is intimate
and close and distant and wide,
buried in numbers and formulas,
found in the complexity of language itself?

What really can we know of time?

A clock on a wall.
A digital display.
The passing of one day.

A life measured against the
age of the earth.
Such an insignificant interval
that seems to mean nothing at all.

Is it birth, life and death?
What is the measure that we apply?
Is time the benchmark of significance,
or something else?

But now I sit here writing, caught up in
words that fall in seconds and minutes.
I am here now thinking of life
and the universe,
and I am wound up in moments
that pass, long and short.

And yet tomorrow, not yet in time,
compels me on, and it too will be
a yesterday, measured and gone,
as the universe stretches out
and out to no return.

Time moves on the atomic clock,
and time moves in my experience
and takes hold of me as its slave.

But I can know time only as I am alive,
and in death time will cease
but also go on to eternity’s gate.

 

5/3/2023