Extracts from a Treatise on Time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

It was 1964 when I first heard Pete Seeger sing Where Have All The Flowers Gone?  I was 17 years-old and moved to tears. I told my mother, adding that I felt such a fool.

‘Never regret tears,’ she said. ‘Only fools never cry. It’s tears that oil the wheels of Time, and without Time there would be no way of carrying our memories to a safe place where we can access them whenever we feel the need…’

'That's daft,' I said.

'No, dear,' she said, 'that's history...'

Now I know better. As I grow old, I need to access my most precious memories; people, places, events that have had, and will always have,  a special place in my life. My mother also spoke of a posthumous consciousness we can access at will, and feel close to those we have loved and since passed away...

This poem is a villanelle:

EXTRACTS FROM A TREATISE ON TIME

Where time, it passes us on,

we, too, pass on in time 

like a flower, its season gone

No wintry world ever reborn

in love’s fair springtime

where time, it passes us on

Find peace on Earth forsworn,

(poetry forsaking rhyme)

like a flower, its season gone

Find all sacred songs written

(to give God a name…?)

where time, it passes us on

On its battlefields dearly won,

glory buries its crime

like a flower, its season gone

Whether molehill or mountain,

may the human spirit climb

where time, it passes us on...

like a flower, its season gone

Copyright R. N. Taber 2008; 2014

[Note: Regular readers may recall that an earlier version of this poem first appeared on the blog under the title 'An Autobiography of Time'.]