The long haul

After Daniel 8:18-27 

The story, the vision,

explains the long haul,

what is to come

over time, long time,

decades, centuries,

perhaps millennia to pass

before fulfillment. He

learns that all will come, 

not in his own time, but

in the One’s time, that

the One manages over time,

through time, and that

it will be in the One’s time,

the One’s timing, and he, and

we, are to prepare and act and 

live as if each day is the last,

and he, and we, we do this 

for the long haul.

 

Photograph by Greg Rosenke via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Midnight Ball" by Sara Barkat

It’s a few minutes after 12 p.m., and Little Song has received an invitation – a special invitation to a midnight ball. Because it will take all day to get to the ball, she immediately hops on her bike and sets out. 

It’s an eventful ride. At very precise times, Little Song meets a host of characters as she pedals along. And being the kind of person she is, she stops and chats. And, of course, each character she meets wants to go to the ball, too. There’s a mouse, a dragonfly, a snake, a frog, a cat, a rabbit, a crow, a spider, a wolf, a moth, a bat (you can tell it’s getting late), and an owl. Ad each brings something along for the ball. But with all the visiting, time is running out.

 

The Midnight Ball, written and illustrated by Sara Barkat, is the children’s story of Little Song, her journey, and the friends she meets. It’s also a story about the clock and keeping time. And it’s a sheer delight of a tale (although I got worried when I saw the wolf join the group).

 

Barkat is the author of The Shivering Ground & Other Stories and The Yellow Wall-Paper : A Graphic Novel. She also worked with Tania Runyan in a collaboration for How to Write a Form Poem: A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Poems. A writer for Poetic Earth Month, she lives near the Hudson River in New York. 

 

Part of The Beautiful Math Series, The Midnight Ball is all the things you expect a good children’s story to be, including the beautiful illustrations.

Top illustration: The spider in The Midnight Ball.

Poets and Poems: Thomas Colquith and “Let Our Memories Escape”

Awareness of time is heightened at two periods of our lives. When we are very young, time appears to move at a glacial pace, especially as we approach birthdays or holidays like Christmas. Nothing seems to make it go faster. When we reach a certain age, often in our mid-to-late-60s, we notice that time is accelerating and seems to be approaching the speed of light. Nothing seems to slow it down. 

Poet Thomas Colquith plays with time. That’s not “play” in the sense of amusement, relaxation, and entertainment, but more in the sense of understanding, experimentation, and speculation. The 52 poems of his latest collection Let Our Memories Escape are meditations on time, the past, the present, and what might have been, but wasn’t.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: River Dixon and "Left Waiting"

Time is our greatest asset, poet River Dixon writes in the introduction to his poetry collection Left Waiting: And Other Poems. It can be painful, unforgiving, and indifferent, he says. Squandering it can be devastating. “But time also gives us those moments when we can step back, put down the load we carry and recognize that there is something more at work here than what we can define. It’s these moments that we find another precious commodity: words.” 

Time and words are themes running through Left Waiting. There is a sense of time fading, like the dying rays of the sun and like what happens when as we age, and decades seem to pass increasingly faster. Where did the time go? How did the children grow up so quickly? I blinked and the four-year-old was graduating from college.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Trail at sunset, or sunrise

It is a trail, flat,

winding its paved way

around a placid lake,

a silent timepiece,

minutes and seconds

sounding with each step,

moving to the sun,

or away from it,

timepieces do that.

Darkness slows as it

approaches sunset,

quickens as it sees

sunrise, the only hints

of which one being

the lessening touch

of God’s breath rustling

the leaves of the trees,

the sound of the child

wanting to go home.

The editors of Tweetspeak Poetry are hosting a 30-Day, 30-Poem Challenge for Earth Month entitled, appropriately enough, Poetic Earth Month. Today, the featured poem is “Hawksbill Crag” by Dave Malone. The poetry promptis to write a poem that lends human or godlike aspects to things in our rneivornment.

Photograph: Sunset at Creve Coeur Park, St. Louis County, Missouri.

Four thousand years

After I Corinthians 15:3-6, 20-26

Four thousand years

of history funneled

into a cave with a stone.

Four thousand years

collided when the stone

rolled away from the cave.

Four thousand years

bore witness to a flash

of time breaking, history

breaking, the air shimmering

in the light of triumph.

Photograph by Roland Larsson via Unsplash, Used with permission.

Clock ticks

After I John 2:18-27

I hear the ticking;

it is the first, or last, sound

I heard when I knew

it was the last hour,

the final bracket of minutes

before the end, or its beginning.

The shadow swept forward

from our midst and went out,

the shadow we did not know

was among us until it left,

as the clock ticked. We looked

at each other, asking the same

questions, what is it, where

did it go, is it coming back,

where do we look, where

do we abide now.

Photograph by Jeanne Rouillard via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Substitute teacher

Fifty years ago I sat

in their places,

shy young faces

full of hope,

and expectancy

and not a little fear,

knowing

the most important thing

is not the class

or whether the substitute

is kind or mean or both

but what will I do this weekend

who will sit next to me at lunch

will she notice me noticing her

noticing me

will dad let me have the car

I’m 16 after all, an adult, really.

Fifty years; half a century,

what separated a stock market crash

from the ayatollah and his screaming minions

and we’re still worried

about the economy and the Iranians.

What shirt do I wear tonight?

Photograph by X Posid via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.