Travelling Light

An EcoChi Vital Abstract

This notebook entry, originally written September 11, 1996, was published in a book of poems and reflections titled “A Responsibility to Awe,” by scientist Rebecca Elson, 2001 Oxford Poets/Carcanet Press.

Time no longer moves

But who made light move at a certain

Speed & only that, & why that

Whose idea was that?

Even light takes time to move across a room

So that it passes, so things change

And so, looking far away, we look into the past

Even as light perceives us as inanimate

Motionless, static in our elements of air and earth

So we see other things that move more slow than us.

And so with speed things move outside our

Window of perception, like blades of a fan

Space contracts, in its elegant rapport with time

Things are only what they seem

And nothing more

Our perceptions squeezed into a tiny space of speed and colour

Imagining all the things we cannot see

A pale dark sun, a star too bright to look

The sky in pieces, the way the earth, with its slow ageing

Sees the stars shoot past like meteors

We too are free to see things as we choose

With patience we could see a flower open

A mushroom push above the earth

The stars heaving and contracting, surging and fading

We carry what comforts and sustains

Which can be space itself and time

Not things, which only weigh us down

Stepping gently over the earth

If you could move the light

How things would slow, & stop

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