Harold Sawkill wondered of the time.
Not what time is, time’s very nature,
not what causes time and why,
but what time it is now, here,
the hour, the minute, the seconds
between meridians in this place.
Harold looked at his watch.
The time was noon exactly,
sun high overhead, exactly, the apex exactly,
before its slow slide down the western sky.
Harold looked again,
the time now 12:00:09, a blink 12:00:11.
He stared, now 12:00:14, now 12:00:17
and so forth on and on.
In 24 hours it would be just after another noon,
noon the next day, and again and again, repeatedly,
Harold looked again and it was 1:00 p.m.,
and later it was 2:00 and it was 3:45 p.m.
And so it goes, the motion we call time,
clock tick and digit flick,
the calendar page ripped from the year,
centuries, even millennia disappear
behind yesterday’s horizon.
History increases and the future –
increases, decreases, who knows.
Harold Sawkill doesn’t think or even care
about the how and why of time, how time
is predictable but the content of time is not,
how one noon’s joy can be the next noon’s sorrow.
Right now Harold’s hungry.
Right now it’s time for lunch.
2016