"A Poem About The Past," "A Poem About The Present," and "A Poem About The Future"

In honor of National Poetry Month, I will be posting work by myself each Friday; here is a recent trilogy of poems about poems about time...


A Poem About The Past

This is a long, epic poem written on
pounded vegetable paper and goat parchment.
After an exhaustive list of all elements produced
during the Big Bang, there follows

lots of blank space

before a trio of paragraphs, each in a language
now completely lost, unrelated to anything spoken today.
Peaks and valleys.

A manor house,
burning fields,
volcano single cell dinosaur meteor ice fire nomadic hunters agriculture gold silver copper wheel canopic democratic Socratic Platonic gun powder gladiator flying buttress Inquisition perspective heliocentric printing press engine cotton gin photography electricity refrigeration flight vaccine relativity atomic moonlanding computer genome Higgs Boson

a foxtrot,
a waltz,
a loose tooth,
a bicycle lying in the yard,
the sun, the moon

©JEF


A Poem About The Present

This is a short poem but
also long because now is eternity,
a hinge connecting two parts, the eye of a storm.

This poem is not written in a column
or in stanzas or with line breaks,
but in a continuous line so you must
walk forward to read it.

All along the shore, a wave
constantly crests but never crashes,
hovering while everyone gathers
to stare, wonder, wait.

©JEF


A Poem About The Future

This is a poem of indeterminate length
that has yet to be finished.
This is a poem written on glass in clear ink
for obvious reasons.

This poem is like a dream,
an imperceptible breeze from
a hurricane a million miles away,
practically invisible but
you can feel it on your skin.
Reading this poem feels like
someone standing behind you,
silent,
patient.

Can we beg for asylum?
Can we ask for more?
Can we beat a retreat
for the back door?

It is coming.
It will come.

This poem is

circles

©JEF