Time

Abstract

This time sequence opens with a soliloquy, or more precisely, a submission to time, in the form of personal lamentations, and is followed by irregular stanzas spanning unidentified episodes of journeying, the intention to do so, or total stasis. Throughout, time is continuously prodded by the intimate journey within one’s own time, by its linguistic and haptic promise, through the name and naming, the names passed on from parents to their child. In this sense, the poem queries the inward pact signed in journeying, between the son on the one hand, and the father and mother on the other, constituting the announcement of history through intersecting times of refugeeness, but equally in the context of humanity and inhumanity as a whole. As time is incessantly probed in this poem, so is journeying within it. In particular, time, as it branches out onto subjective (and non-subjective) times, is conveyed initially through the journeying from I/We to They in the poem, ushering in competing pronouns in an attempt to blur time itself and those inside and outside it. The premise of this poem, or body of poems, is not in any way to locate time with precision, physically or historically, but to repeat a question which seldom finds a place and time; that is, “where is time” to witness the future?

Keywords

• time
• the body
• journeying
• dialects
• secrets
• farness