now


(image courtesy of h.koppdelaney)

the time has come

from
      every universe
      all eternity
      every potential
      all possibility

the time is now

just
      this once
      once again
      we converge together
      at this humility

the time has come
      time for truth
      time for stillness
      time for freedom
      time for love
      time for nothing

the counterpoint
      of billions of
            independent
            sentient
            universes
      has coincided
in this single present

Posted in Poetry and tagged .

6 Comments

  1. my thoughts on this:I had the idea of using Dr. Suess's Marvin K. Mooney book as the springboard for this poem. I wanted to go along with the sing-songy nature of that, so I kept a bit of a rhyme and meter going for this one. I wanted to use this child's rhyme to explore the profound nature of time and the present, and how we independently converge upon the same moment. The idea is that everyone in the challenge is looking at the same picture for inspiration this week, so in a way, the same way that a Bach fugue has independent melodies which converge in various ways in harmony, we create poetry based on a single image. I expanded this out to include all of humanity in the coda. I'm afraid that the duplicity in the word 'present' at the end is appropriate, but perhaps unfortunately trite; I'm still working on an ending idea which is better than this.

  2. Jim, I thought I recognized "the time has come, the time is now, I don't care how you go, just get…" etc. from Marvin K. Mooney. I always had a great time reading that to my daughters ~30 years ago.Your final stanza clinches it for me. Very nice!

  3. I love the way this poem to seems to drift through time throughout the beginning and then, within the last stanza, sort of climaxes and comes to a very final, very definite end. Very effective.

  4. 3/5/2010 I had some thoughts and discussions with my wife about this and edited some things. I wanted to make the reference to the found portions from Dr Suess a little more subtle, and I lifted things from Eccl 3 being about time and the obvious references in the image to death and rest and the cycles of things. So, here you go.Again, I really appreciate the comments.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *