tock

as the mechanism unwinds
a kind of breathing ebbs and flows

ending and beginning repeat
start finish then rewind

sound without echo rings untrue
like a bell in an airless place

or the sun overhead
casting too little shadow

time uncounted slips untraced
from the clock of motionless hands

no-one hears the seconds die away
nor sees the slow decay of atoms

whose rhythm punctuates
the rise and fall of all things

whose music plays behind us
as we sing on into tomorrow

imagine a sound without its silence
look for light outside its darkness

try again to count the unnumbered stars
hold back the turning wheels of clockwork

hear the difference if you can
between tick and tock

© BH, 2023

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In 2018, I wrote a poem called Tick Tock which was featured on the now defunct Poetry24 website. Like all poems P24 featured, it was a response to a current news report – in this case, impending climate catastrophe. I’ve reposted it here.

This year I separated the words of the title to see if I could make a different kind of sense of them. So, Tick and Tock… the former a more philosophical take on time and the erosion of our brief humanity.

The latter, a companion poem, Tock, is also about the temporal nature of things and how we differentiate them, not always accurately. So, we hear nuance where none exists: we see a whole when there are only parts or we see parts but not the whole.

We see difference; we don't see the difference.

Perhaps we're not so bright after all…