This poem came to me after a visit to London, where I was thunderstruck by the  scale and beauty of the restored Reading Room at the British Museum. I was also wrestling with Existentialism at the time.

 

 

A Book of Hours

 

There was Time when its Arrow

flowed like a ticking clock

 

as it carved the future from the past

like a blind sculptor in one dimension

 

but, since there is no Now,

I live by reveries of hours,

 

each one a diegesis, each mimed

in chromatic silence;

 

an hour under the British Museum

Reading Room's golden-blue cupola

 

or a Summer morning's airing

through Russell Square,

 

Sartre in hand, floating in harmony

with singing birds

 

as, one by one, the hours

vanish in the freighted air.

 

In fading light

through smoky London trees,

 

where the wind kicks

crackled leaves at late commuters,

 

I fly

to where the river flows:

 

down East to the dirty sea;

the Thames, like me

 

and Sartre,

condemned to be free.

 

 

Christopher Hubbard

Perth,

2017