A Meditation on Time

by Jacqueline Jules


Time moves faster on a mountain
than on a beach.

Researchers with clocks have proved it.

No need for my own impatient perceptions.

Seconds don’t budge in a doctor’s office
while they blaze from birthday to birthday.

Has it really been twenty years
since that movie I recalled
while brushing my teeth?

It all goes so fast
unless my husband is driving home
at night in a snowstorm.

How did I reach sixty-five?

Time is too elastic, always
stretching or contracting,
never pausing long enough
to grasp why
I count how many seconds lost
before I savor the ones still left.


* * * * *

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including The Sunlight Press, Gyroscope Review, and One Art. She is also the author of two poetry books for young readers, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence (Albert Whitman, 2020) and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit  www.jacquelinejules.com