In every age, a mature woman of experience is eyed with suspicion, called names (but “Wise” is not often one of them).
She recounts: “There’s a pull, a push.”
We listen, in a hush.
“Our cycles,” she says, “the moon.” Then whispers, “New rules soon.”
“Light, its speed, will not budge,” might say the professor, a decisive judge.
The reporter: “Truth is not a perspective.”
The officer: “Time is a detective.”
“Laws are unchanging, inscrutable,” says the minister, mutable.
The philosopher: there’s no “yes,” no “no.”
The up-and-coming starter-upper says: “Let’s go!”
But that wise woman of every century: when she spotted accepted truth, that old dragon, she slayed it, soon as she could see it.
I asked her, “Can you tell time?” so she told it off, and so it stayed, like truth and the dragon, slayed. Time—no longer fate—reduced to this lesser state.
Time turned off, so: there is no mystery, no history. What then of you and me? You sing, “I love you to eternity.”
But time, ended, its arrow, bended to an arc that peters…stutters…derails. Where is the fact that never fails?
In truth, then, love must subdue all, of a moment, and our story’s rise and fall.
