NO TIME LIKE TOMORROW

If we want to speak in truth without

foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak

about the eternal that is neither timelessness

nor endless time…There is not time after time, but

there is eternity above time.

-Paul Tillich: The Eternal Now

We live in time – it holds us and moulds us –

but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.

-Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

In England in September my train speeds north.

Harvest’s home: evening smoke

from the stubble fires preserves the ploughman’s soul

unto eternal life. Hay carpet squares and rolls

of underfelt stand stacked

ready to be laid to damp

the tread of winter

on the soil.

But winter never comes, least not all dead.

Instead each winter moment secretly contains

a million hedgerow life events.

Spring ejaculates a billion

flinging, thrashing, rising, flailing

motile things with tails.

The long line of seasons can deceive:

“Time’s like the shining British Rails –

winter was King’s Cross,

spring’s Inverness, yes?”

No. For analogy

I much prefer the sea:

beyond the coast and intervening farms,

mobile moods at once and everywhere connected.

Fish-full summer current here is

knife-sharp iceberg there

under ebbing twilight when

high-tide bright elsewhere.

Hey, brown cow, brown bull, whose

deep appealing eyes smile as etched

images in my Intercity window!

Do you sense the movement in my soul,

the ocean’s swirl,

that while there’s no time like tomorrow,

eternity is now?

                                    19/9/86