The hours, like stained glass
original poetryPreface
Since today is my birthday (yes, I was born on New Year's Eve!) what better topic for today's poem than time and our relation to it? In the vastness of great dimensions of spacetime and timespace, are we but blips on the radar? Or is the portion of ourselves that is subject to time, death and decay only the most superficial aspect of being?
Reading notes
Stanza 1 & 2
(Time is stopped...Time goes nowhere.).
Expresses Time as paradoxically motionless yet moving. It is indifferent yet in the perception of a living being it appears cruel.
Stanza 3 & 4
(An owl watching...but it can't digest them.).
Stanza three gives various abstract metaphors to describe Time, implying that these bizarre images arise from its proficiency as a hypnotist. Stanza four portrays Time as a chitinous monstrosity brutally destroying life, yet also declares its inability to remove the essence of Life.
Stanza 5 & 6
(It's a river...Time takes everything away.).
More paradoxical faces of Time, with deeper emotion, reflecting on the nature of form's evanescence.
Stanza 7, 8 & 9
(It's shattered geometries... for it's own.).
Expresses the limitations that Time imposes on fleshbound beings yet hints at its constructive pressure: the rare opportunity for growth that it provides.
The hours, like stained glass
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Time is stoppedbut it moves somewhere
on its own.
in precipitous sheets
Time washes destiny.
It witnesses frailty,
makes me its slave
in motionless indifference
to run the wheel
destinationless–
Time goes nowhere.
An owl watching symphonies decay
Grizzled ewe nibbling on society's edge
Dragon guzzling life's waterfall
Chimeric torturer
Voluptuous satyr
Time the hypnotist.
Time the murderer
stealing an ocean of vigor
with a collision of chitin & skin,
draining, draining, giving nothing:
Time has nothing;
it eats my fruits
but it can't digest them.
and a molten core,
the reality as it's felt
the wisps of nothingness fondled
the hands of destruction giving birth
Time does nothing
but it watches me.
It's a melody,
an echo of intangible sentiment;
it makes me tear up
but I open my eyes
to a wedding scene,
a child being born–
Time takes everything away.
It's shattered geometries
and inadequacy
and regret.
the limitation of faculties,
the boundary of comprehension,
the defect & the rouge.
hourglass of wheat,
smile of curds & cobweb:
Time the grinning daemon
that wants me for its own.
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Written by
@d-pend
12/31/17
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Images by
.1 --- "Behind the stained glass" by atLevel1Alt (edited)
2 --- "Stained glass spiral" by MichaelHawkins
3 & 4 --- "Stained glass snowflake 2" by CeltCraft (edited)
5 --- "Stained glass snowflake 1" by CeltCraft (edited)
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