Swift Passage

I embrace the silence of time
which flows between us like a deep
green river divides a continent, unwittingly.

With the integrity of water, pure
at source it moves the endless particles
of unconscious matter downstream, insistently.

The nature of your stillness
is not partial nor given to hostility,
but steady as the undercurrent’s implacability.

I stand opposite, reaching toward
your presence on the far bank, estranged
by the swift passage of nights to fall, indissolubly.



I am doubling up on challenges again this week:

Sanaa's Midweek Challenge asks us to draw inspiration from Pablo Neruda's poem, I like for You to be Still.
Kim's Weekend Challenge, references the poem Let Evening Come, by Jane Kenyon and asks for a pastoral theme written in tercets.

Circadian Rhythm

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Clock of the Académie Française, Paris
Andre Kertesz (1932)

She has gathered pigeon feathers
from beneath the clock tower
where they lie scattered like little bits of wind
or piled in iridescent drifts
beneath window arches and cornices.
Now she is weaving them
into a mantle of bright shadows
pinkened down, tealed plume
pinions of smoke and ash
to cloak her frailty
in a cloud of dull light.

He is keeper of the clock
winder of coils and springs,
inspector of the great hands’ slow toil
and pendulum’s swing,
who has measured his life
in gradations of the hour; all that is circadian, mute.
Now he is peering down at the world
but all he sees is time
in the painstaking march of tired feet,
a minute too late to contemplate heaven
and the last angel
dwindling from grey into blue.



Camera FLASH! in the Imaginary Garden.