When The Clocks Went Quiet

An imperfect poem and related thoughts

I first drafted this poem 10 days ago when the opening line fell perfectly into my consciousness, capturing the a particularly wistful felt sense that best materialises on winter days. Over the following week I drafted and redrafted it in the gaps that life allowed, tweaking and re-ordering the lines, changing words and syllables and rhythms - getting ever closer to precisely capturing the feeling I meant, but asymptoting somewhere a distance away from what I wanted.

Today I realised that at this rate, with the bar that I set myself and the time and energy I have available, I was not going to be able to post it for months. So I took a small decision to change the bar, and show it to you imperfect.

I am not a professional poet, curating and editing my best works to publish an anthology. I’m an amateur writer playing with form and medium, learning my preferences, experimenting with where and when and how I put words to page. Waiting for perfection is depriving myself of valuable feedback loops and connections, with others and with my own future self.

As the apocryphal tale about the ceramics class goes, one hundred imperfect pieces teaches more than trying to create one perfect pot.

When the clocks went quiet

When the clocks went quiet
Time stopped being real
One day the bells stopped ringing
Their ringers stopped climbing
The cuckoos stopped singing
The mantles stopped chiming
(Around the time when poems stopped rhyming)
No cockerels to cry it
No trumpets to cheer
Time had stopped being something you hear
And became only something you feel

Time used to be louder
Ever hour shouted its power
Society's sonic psychic link
Abandoned: no more were we in sync

Now no gong will gladden your gloom
No ding nor dong diverts your doom
As you silently ruminate inside your room

No sound to startle you from reveries
Nor jolt your heart from sunken memories
Of bygone times and stalwart melodies