She is Time …

A giantess

A dwarf

A bear

A bird

Mother sister daughter all

Originator and child born

Wondrous

Awful

Tender

Harsh

Caressing – “You still have Time my love, my beloved one.”

“No Time left – Hurry you wicked child!”

I have avoided her presence.

I have acknowledged it too.

Youth or innocence or stupidity

Wisdom or just older and old age coming and then …

“I wasn’t really so ugly after all.”

Day after day and hour after hour of self criticism.

Now looking back

I beg you, “Let me make myself again!”

Help me form from clay instead of skin containing organs blood and bone.

Help me become an uncontaminated version of me

Instead of influence bombarding and impinging from all directions.

But Time will do what she wants and leaves me to learn.

Gives me precious gifts as well as throwaway baubles that will remain until infinity – Signs of me that were.

The passing of –

Who I am

Who we all are

What we learn

How to be.

Make the most of it.

Don’t waste time or do waste some time

Sometimes –

From time to time stop and

Feel and appreciate every moment of … but …

Best laid plans.

The past rises up in black and white or technicolour shards.

Puzzle together

Manufacture memory

Did it happen?

All a part of you.

Primordial – before time, before building began

Past, present, future – all times.

Hauntings, soaked and seeped into the walls the floors, the earth.

The words, the sighs, the emotions, the pleasures, the pains.

Mine mingle into the sediment of all others who came before me and those that will come.

Haunting me from the future as well as the past.

Thoughts, realities, fantasies, plans and ambitions unrealized, regretted, yearned for –

Unique and mine a part of everything that was and is.

Foolish, brave, meek, timid, strong.

All of these cycling

Who and what potential there was and is to be …

In the past in the present, in the future, in the “non” time

Just the “am” just “is” just “be” time

Would you live differently?

Reincarnation, what animal will you be?

Heaven, hell, purgatory?

Please let me –

Reclaim my self from time reclaim my fresh plump and tighter skin,

Like a lizard let me shed my tarnished and webbed self.

You are cruel but I understand.

My face, my body, my thought, is witness to evermore.

My life with others, everything I saw, everything I wanted, tasted, everything experienced – everything even wickedness.

Where in the ridges of lives does she settle?

Which cracks does she fall into?

Pressed under foot

Like leaves that begin to change colour, dry and wither while others remain under ice and snow, amber till spring when they will die, become part of what came before.

In the dew of the grass

The web of the spider

The speck of dust motes that float.

Day after day

Cycles of nature bring joy and sadness too, the end or fading of memories

Time so tied into every cell and twinge and hurt and joy.

Make way for her!

You can scurry out of the way and hide, for now, don’t think of her passing.

Hide your eyes!

Recoil from her!

But better to move toward her and welcome the shadow she throws down over you.

She is an unavoidable presence enveloping you with her wings.

A large bird is time with a wing span covering all and felt everywhere

Manufactured in factories

Forged in metal

Grown from the soil

Born from a tender nest and fed and nurtured

Created from mystery – the beginning of everything.

She takes from me without my consent

Wild and powerful and strong Time.

I feel her shadow.

She is near.

She will take me

When she is ready.

​Words and Picture (C) Carmit Kordov

Carmit is an administrator of the Folk Horror Revival Facebook group. Her poetry has appeared in Corpse Roads , a Wyrd Harvest Press book.

Please visit Carmit Kordov Words and Pictures for more poetry, photography, writing and cultural content that veers towards Magic Realism.