In the vacuum of space,
no clocks tick,
there’s no watch to check
if you are late,
no hands to blur
the flow of time.
Comets crash,
stars burn,
all the while planets turn
and scientists no longer wind:
they measure with quiet
quantum mechanics,
atomic clocks and relativity,
warping time with precision
while we sit in comfy chairs,
watching cuckoos chase
worms down holes in space,
and clocks melt
into fuzziness,
heavy with the weight.
Kim M. Russell, 2017
The Persistance of Memory by Salvador Dali image found on WikiArt
My response to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Fireblossom Friday: Incongruity
Fireblossom is challenging us this Friday with incongruity. Specifically, we are going to try to write setting that doesn’t match action, or character that does not coincide with setting.
She has given us examples of incongruity in her own poems:
Garden Wall
They stood daddy up
against the garden wall
and shot him through the head for writing against the regime.
Our ginger cat
hid behind the tomato vines.
Its eyes were yellow. The sky was blue. The leaves speckled red on the green.
Fireblossom says that the peaceful sunlit setting does not line up with the brutal act that takes place in it. This incongruity jars the reader and heightens the effect.
In The Year Of
In the year of the pestilence,
in the time of the puppet government,
we fell in love.
We held hands, and gamboled
as others doubled over and died.
In the year of the pogrom,
in the hour of the public noose,
we were giddy,
and grateful for our milky corneas
our couplings, and our luck.
This poem ‘seems’ like a love poem, played out against a backdrop of revolution and death but is, Fireblossom explains, a piece about wilful blindness.
She says both examples are rather grim in their subject matter, but incongruity lies at the heart of humour, as well. It is the absurd, the thing we don’t expect, that is often the very thing which makes us laugh. And so, our poems can be light, if we wish. Fireblossom asks us to mix it up, explore incongruity, and write a NEW poem for this prompt.
writing in north norfolk 
I love the blend of science and poetry here, with a dash of Dali.. wonderfully done, Kim.
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Thank you, Kerry!
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As I sit here writing this there’s a large meteorite (larger than earth) coming this way! Let’s hope not!
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😦
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Clever – time is an elusive thing – and yet we are constantly trying to capture it (and sometimes think we have it under control!)
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Thanks for reading, Margaret!
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Luv the shift to the Cuckoo’s chase. Up in star dreams and down to earth again.
Magnificent write
Much love…
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I love your fusion with poetry and science 😀 such an awe-inspiring write ❤️
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Thanks Sanaa!
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Time and space and our own human attempts to define(perhaps limit) them for our own comfort and comprehension are indeed an incongruity. The metaphors in the last stanza especially are apt and adroit.
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Thank you!
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Brava.. 🌹🌹🌹
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😊
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excellent choice of subject matter…time and space…we try too hard to define…to fit…..but we are human.
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Of course I love the way we look at time… a wonderful subject, and the difference in the scientific view on time (actually it was partly the subject of my thesis many years ago) versus the time we see today.
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I think time itself is incongruous 😊
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Gives new meaning to “It’s five o’clock somewhere…”
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