The Paddock Review

…..

Olivia and I learn about the nature of time and space

 

 

Not the shortest day, Olivia corrects, 

time is all the same, the days,

I mean.  She’s reaching for words

 

to encapsulate what yogis and physicists,

even visionaries can’t articulate, 

but she doesn’t know that yet,

 

seven years old, maybe eight, a so-large block

of her school life to date spent in a square box

trying to learn science via Zoom 

 

in this season of plague.   What must she feel, Olivia, 

ten months away from playmates, such dark times,

everything askew?  Cold solstice and I learn 

 

Jupiter and Saturn align as light wanes, one great 

conjunction of the two largest planets in our known system

combining their brightness over a tired city.  

 

Just look south and west, Corina instructs 

as I sit on my yoga mat what we call hours later.

There will be such brightness, and is this

 

irony or blessing on a day when most of the hours 

all days contain will be spent in darkness 

before the world tilts back.    In second grade,

 

I learned only of time’s forward motion, learned

never to hold still in the now as now, nearing seventy, 

I hold still, this Great Conjunction glimmering.

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Because Time (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/because-time-by-liz-abrams-morley/ .

The poems in Because Time invite the reader into the imagined future of the poet’s youngest students, and grandchildren, as this fragile generation negotiates the “unprecedented” times of pandemic, school shootings, abridgement of bodily autonomy and a climate gone bizarre;  simultaneously the poems interrogate and redefine experiences and traumas of generations gone.  A rumination on disruptions, on “life after so much death,”  an homage at times to resilience, and a prayer for the future, the poet seeks words to keep this youngest generation, despite logic and the odds, “crazy for hope.”

Liz Abrams-Morley’s previously poetry collections include, Beholder, Inventory, Necessary Turns and Learning to Calculate the Half Life.  Her poems and short stories have been published in a variety of nationally distributed anthologies, journals and ezines and have been read on National Public Radio.  She has collaborated with visual artists, both as a collage artist and incorporating her poetry into visual art pieces.