Time

6.20 and my iphone comes to life telling me that I have slept my allotted 7 hours. Downstairs I can hear the dogs nudging the doors to their crates, and descend to release them into the garden. Then fed we embark on our circle of the villages, passing All Saints, The Barn and Bird’s Grange on the right as we saunter towards Great Bookham, and then up to Polesden Lacey before turning back home on the Guildford Road. We skirt the KGV and turn at St Lawrence into The Street, and then past Bevans head into Middle Farm Place, the long meadow where I let them off their leashes. I watch them run, play in the long wet grass, licking the dew from the weighted stems as if it were the first. I can hear the drumbeat of the woodpeckers loud from within the distant copse of greening ash and rain glossed yew, and am reminded of the rhythm of nature’s clock and our own problematic relationship with time. I take out my phone and record:

in time there is no time

except that in which we grieve the passing of time,

that which IS crumbling into that which WAS

and we, fearful of the time to come,

sit in our darkened spaces splintered,

desperate, clutching onto the cracked bottles

in which we think we have captured time

and watch the shimmering fireflies of our mind

fade,

until there is no more time.