We watch the clock’s hands, but not our own,
and I’ve grown to believe that there are ten hours in a day,
one for each crescent-moon fingernail.
Time has a body.
Its fingers are beams of sunlight
that gently part the curtains of the night's darkness.
The hands of Time obviously belong to the clock,
forever ticking it’s insensible chatter.
The shoulders are the great cliffs down which water pours,
misting, flowing, marking every minute with the movement of life.
The bosom of Time would be the whole universe,
surrounding all like a mother’s embrace.
The head of Time is the Earth,
in its rotations and revolutions.
It is the meaning of Time,
why the sun sets,
why the year ends,
why we don’t just float away…
The legs and feet are our hearts,
pounding out the sound of Time
running
out.
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Time spent:
Canary word: Present
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,732 Reviews
Oh man, that last stanza makes it all worth it, doesn't it?
fortis, do you think you could live with a poem if it looked like this?
I know it's much shorter -- it cuts out a lot of imagery you worked on, but I'll give you my reasoning and see what you think. I feel like the main point of this poem was to bring the idea to Time into something physical. And the most efficient way to make something feel physical to relate it to the reader's body, because we are intimately aware of our own bodies, and just mentioning how we breath in and breath out and it happens usually automatically, we become aware of our breathing and have to do it consciously until we're distracted again.
In this same way, talking about our fingernails makes us bodily aware. It's the most engaging part of this poem.
The stanzas that I cut out are less bodily. They're more abstract. Like the idea of beams of sunlight. We can't directly relate to that. Again, it's making the concept of time something we can't catch or feel or care about. The water rushing in waterfalls means nothing to us if it doesn't touch our skin. The head of Time is just questions -- questions we haven't been able to answer and still won't be able to by the end of the poem.
But the idea of fingernails. The pounding rhythm reaching up from our legs and feet to be felt in our hearts is tangible. And pairing that with the flow of time, with the counting of time, the ticks of time, bring us in line with the clock and we effectively get the emotion that I think you were going for.
I hope these thoughts are helpful to you!
PM me if you have any questions or comments, or leave a reply to this review.
Good luck and keep writing wonderful things!
Hannah
Hey! First of all, I have to say; wow. This is such an amazing poem, I loved it, the language you used to paint your images was beautiful.
I loved the last line in the fourth stanza, how you describe each finger as being a crescent-moon, it is a gorgeous image that really wraps and ties that whole stanza together.
Personifying time was brilliant, it really creates this sense of flowing moments and makes it seem like the reader is reading something that has a sense of movement in it. My favorite line being "Its fingers are beams of sunlight" it is a very pretty image.
Also, I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I loved the way you sized the lengths of each line. If you look at the poem with your head tilted, it almost looks like a graph from a heart rate monitor. In the beginning, you see a steady "beat" but as the poem progresses, the lines grow smaller and the "beats" start to level out until the very end when it levels off completely and the patient would be considered clinically dead.
One thing I say you might want to consider is more complex language, I'm not saying that the way you write isn't, but forming your sentences in more complex and deeper ways could develop your ideas in different ways. It is just a suggestion though and honestly you're a great poet either way.
There is so much more that I could go on about in this poem, but I think other reviewers should comment on them and give their own interpretation of them. All in all, I really enjoyed your poem and I hope to read some more from you soon!