Time.
Let’s talk about it.
We are over halfway through Lent. (If you’ve missed this blog’s Lenten journey, you can find the previous posts here: Ash Wednesday, fasting, being “present”, and heaviness.)
On the one hand, it feels interminable: how many more weeks/days/hours of this do we have left, exactly? On the other, realizing that Holy Week is less than two weeks away sends me into a sort of panic: Lent was supposed to be this deeply transformative time! Is the transformation happening too slowly? Have I missed it? Am I ready for Easter?
(The answer to that last question is, of course, ALWAYS no. The world wasn’t, isn’t, and never will be ready for Easter. That’s the beauty of it.)
These reflections led me to the old Latin expression tempus fugit: “time flies”. Methinks it needs a counterpart: tempus reptat. (Time crawls.)
If I were to invent a character for “time”, I think it would be a rabbit, loping along at an easy pace. Every so often, though, it finds it is being chased by a horde of other, tiny, whiny rabbits, so it starts running as fast as it can to get away. When they catch it (they always do), they leap upon it, clinging to every available hair and appendage, slowing it down to a dragging stumble. Eventually, they fall asleep, and the rabbit shakes them off and goes about its way – until they wake up, and the cycle begins again.
I like this image. It’s weird (so am I), but it works. I think I’ll save it for a story someday.
The awkward dance (we’re talking middle school dance awkward) between fugit and reptat in my brain eventually spun themselves into the first verse of this week’s poem. I wasn’t sure where the poem would go, so I decided to invent a set of challenging rules (rhyme scheme, meter, alliteration, internal rhymes, etc.) and let the meaning sort itself out along the way. After all, a tricky topic like time deserves a tricky poem.
This is an effective exercise for any aspiring poets out there: create your own poetic form and then make yourself say whatever you want to say through that form.
As sometimes happens, the rules of this poem’s form helped shape the poem’s message. I had to reject certain words because they didn’t fit with the alliteration or the internal rhyme, and that forced me to search the reservoirs of language for other words, sometimes taking the meaning of the line in a different direction.
It was fun. 🙂
The result was a poem that expressed some of my frustrations with time – both abstractly and personally – while ending yet again in the same place to which Lent seems determined to guide me every week:
God is here, and God is good.
~ Even when time slips rapidly through my frantically clutching fingers, taking my hopes for the future with it;
~ even when time hangs around my neck like a chain, crushing those same hopes beneath its unyielding weight till I feel them dying in my hands;
~ even when the passing of time seems to reveal nothing but an increase of incomprehensible suffering in the world, both close to my heart and unknown to me save as a numbing headline:
God is here, and God is good.
May this weird, tricky poem leave you with some small taste of that truth, and may Easter find us all in good time.
Too
Too slow, but too fast
First brushing, then blast-
-ing present to past
And who can stand?
Too fast, but too slow
First gasping, then groan-
-ing, timelines in tow
By whose demand?
Too much of “not quite”
First rusting, then writ-
-ing spitefully trite
“Bagged, boxed, or canned?”
Too few of “yes, please”
First truce-ing, then teas-
-ing teaspoons from seas
How was this planned?
Too soft, and too hard
Accosting, then card-
-ing visions to guard
Of open land
Too fierce, and too sweet
All-piercing, complet-
-ing hope’s steady beat:
Hold out your hand.
Wow! This was TRICKY but not false . . . Ever the invitation, the extended hand, the hope of communion and rest.
You are amazing, Ruth!