MEASURING TIME

During the dark of the year, 

my grandmother said, open the door. 

Let the spirits in. Or was it out? 

As we burnt sage, and she tended the hearth,

I never could remember the sequence.

I was young, an imperfect student. 

But I learned to walk barefoot in the dust 

to let the soothing songs of the earth in. 

And that certain rocks had a powerful thirst 

that needed libation and coinage. 

We measured the arc of time 

by clocking sunrise through the seasons 

by the sentinel pines on the ridge. 

In summer, the sun hovered over the big rock, 

as if to land, then pushed south along the ridge. 

It’s all grown in now. We can’t see the markers. 

The world has become so far removed from the old ways. 

So, in my 7th decade, I tempered the passage of time, 

by witnessing the pulse of the seasons in the tent, 

so I could hear her again as she tended the garden.

1/4/23 Write On! Susie Terence

NB So, the tent is gone as of last night’s storm. I had no idea I was writing an elegy for the tent. It was hit with up to 80 mph winds. It lifted up off the ground like a mad UFO and hovered for a while before it crashed into the upper garden fence.