Time moves on

A poem by Liz Thompson

 

The clock moves on.

The second hand revolves

A steady movement through the day,

The week, the year, the decade.

At length the rock is dust.

The tree is earth.

Seeds shoot and grow

Again.

As ever, heat and rain drift.

Brick, concrete, rises, falls, where stone once stood.

The clock moves on.

A trench is dug to shelter guns

Or children

And look, a Saxon sword is there.

How long before that hole throws out

A wheelchair plus its occupant?

A person in a wheelchair with distorted clock as a wheel on a beige background.
image adapted by Kavana Ramaswamy from image by Font Awesome Free 5.4.1 by @fontawesome – https://fontawesome.com/, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons”

Liz Thompson is active long term as trade unionist in civil service (social security/universal credit, 25 years), then volunteered in community centre ,Leeds, and is a member Unite Community (Leeds, Wakefield, York branch). She is an ACR member on the editorial board.

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