by Mary Padilla
Not a sensation, but a concept,
just an abstraction we concoct,
merely a means to keep what happens
from trying to go on all at once.
Though we can measure it precisely,
to experience it is not the same.
Once we look below its surface,
the when is quite a different thing.
The now is vanishingly thin,
poised between before and after,
on the cusp of evanescence,
on the verge of not forever.
While it never leaves the present,
the eternal exists but out of time,
failing to engage with either
what once was or what’s to be.
Though inexorably marking passage,
of itself it alters nothing,
as it flows on without ceasing,
soundless, its own hourglass.
All around us and within us,
though with tangible effects,
time itself remains unmoved,
as it can merely mark the change.
It is left to us to be
the ones to come to terms with it.
For in the end, time simply measures
nothing other than itself.
Mary Padilla writes to see what she thinks.