The Time Traveller

Music:  Courtesy of Breaking Orbit

Time is the twist in a rope of moments,

the slashing of straight lines,

the trysting with giant hogweed,

the whole season nesting

within a cuckoo's call.

My head is poisoned by living,

and still I feed  the sludge with more,

pickling and hardening its ways,

putting a pointless tip

on the spear of an intellect waiting,

waiting for the blind hand of winter

to rest on its shoulder

and lead it trembling away.

My dreams become richer

as my life becomes poorer

and it is in the wing tips of my view

that I glimpse a soul hiding, always hiding,

rarely to the fore.

When I arrived in your yard - that evening -

a great door stood open,

and inside,

scattered around rough hewn and storied tables,

sat four men from a family

who had all cut stone for generations.

They all held chisels

that were poised to speak,

silenced in mid sentence,

casually held at the end of one muscled arm,

in the other, a clumsy wooden mallet.

They used the Latin letters now

as it had been so decreed many years before,

but they remembered wistfully the time when

it was only the ancient letters they had fed

with their iron.

I told them of clever things that I knew,

like being able to sail a boat

and write a poem

and the travels I had been on.

What sense would it make to say

I put words behind glass

and had friends I had never seen or heard,

icons of strangers that appeared

on the same glassy screen?

How could I tell them

that I was no longer measured

by my ability to feed myself and loved ones,

but by numbers that others stored up and counted,

measuring me and maintaining

my captivity with invisible chains,

bound in servitude by the very dreams

they had placed so carefully

when the mind was still young and malleable?

For once, all words failed me

and I was ashamed at how I had wasted

all they had handed me down,

ashamed that it seemed

every generation had to learn the humility

of knowing all their efforts would ultimately

be in vain;

a lifetime of efforts scattered, like the powdered stone

they blew away, in their search for shape and form,

now duned beneath their feet.

I saw then, that what they carved away,

had as little importance, as that which they left behind.

I saw that they were full of honest mirth

and companionship,

and that their strength was not only in their arms

but in the way they could look at each other,

and  how they used the time between hearing

and opening their mouths,

to wait, to think, to see.

They told me of the little things that mattered to them,

like the first thought in the morning,

the last wish at night,

the trust of a child,

the recognition in the eyes of the old.

They told me of you!

They told me they had been watching

and I was not wanting

that they were happy I had found my way.

They told me the crystal ball has no weight

for those with sleight of hand and mind,

and history merely affords a place, a stage,

where those that stand and stare

have their pockets picked

for the price of a brief visit to where once

we all lived free.

Then one of them spoke about how a man

can fold his dreams too carefully

and how, after years of practice

he might still cut slices of bread from the loaf

while concealing his hunger,

and portion his food by strict mathematical formulae

laying it geometrically on a square plate

keeping toast always to the right,

pointing the sausages,

sliding eggs to where they should wait,

ready to be sliced and dipped,

bite by poisonous  bite,

eternally plotting, and unaware

of his own incremental dis-assembly.

They told me I should speak of this,

to you.

                                                                    ©Copyright Niall OConnor 2016