The Poetry of Time

I have a folder of Barry Hopkins articles clipped from The Wellington Advertiser. 

He is a wise observer of man and beast, sky and sod...

Upon a canvas made of years

Life pens verses; love’s smiles, hurt’s tears

Where page-on-page its haste endears

With numerals, each flitting bit

And looking back we come to see

How precious is the brevity

Of what we hold and then set free

To be the memory of it

Upon a stack of ills, bills, thrills

Black ink of night musters refills

Of morning light that brightly spills

Then drains into dusk-blue cajole

As youth learns truth; how we entrust

Our dream to time’s ultimate; dust

And yet it bears a sacred Must

Because this dust harbours a soul

Upon time’s give and taking ways

We scrawl as rise and falling days

Dawn clear then fade to distant haze

Where we gaze, amazed at the rhyme

Of clock-chimes tolling hour on hour

They break the bud and shake the flow’r

Back to the earth to birth spring’s bow’r

We call the poetry of Time

© Janet Martin