When Clocks Tick
by Odin Roark

When the clock’s hands travel,
Does its inner workings wonder,
As it watches us watch its timeless movement
We subtracting time remaining
It knowing time has no limit?

Perhaps it sees us gaze at numbers
Like tenacious landmarks in stop motion orbit,
Digits holding like lonely sentinels
Guarding the fixed passages of life’s journey.

We watch this precise start and stop of perpetual movement
Challenging distance and time,
Wanting immortality to be a possibility,
Thinking life might end,
But what if existence knows not a demise,
Only a change in form?

How innocent our youth,
Apprehensive our adulthood,
Anxious our aging experience
Wanting the end to be but a new beginning.

To avoid disappointment,
To embrace the unknown as wisdom-in-waiting,
To console loved ones and their anticipation
To persuade and convince doubting is waste.

Might there be…

Hands that travel
Measuring time for the living,
While preparing the passing over
As not an end,
But a subtle modulation?

Could the denial of the beyond as forward,
Prove a losing dispute with the cosmic empirical,
To reject evolution’s lineage in progress,
That primal place from where life came,
And will return,
In yet another form.

Lest we forget,
We are matter,
Matter cannot be destroyed,
Its existence knows not end,
We have but to wait and see.

Looking ahead,
Me, a rock,
You, a bug,
Dad, an extraterrestrial,
Mom, something that isn’t defined yet?

For some,
Death is only to see a dark hallway,
Or a cliché tunnel of light.
For some of us,
No frills and sanctimonious knowing does it,
There’s merely trust in continuance.