On my ninetieth birthday's festive date
this generous vision of human time...
At first, I could not take my eyes away
from this fresh promise of our future love:
this face — unfamiliar yet so well known.

An almost invisible seconds hand
seems not to move, yet moves — so thin and frail:
only when I give it a closer glance
do I see it moves, a shadow, and yet
moving unagitated round the crop

of seconds that are minutes that are hours
informing its permanent idiot grin
on some jolly farmer's face that glows with
healthy satisfaction as he surveys
his ever-ripening crop of ages —

all the minutes, hours, days, nights, weeks and months
of timeless time's accumulating years.
— Beside this seconds hand, but more substantial,
still with soundless tick the busy minute,
honest labourer, moves from sheaf to sheaf

as the hour's broad black scythe collects from time
to time the growing scaffoldings of days
on dusk's lumbering carts of endless life
that soon will trail their loaded skirts of straw
into the timeless barns of deepest night

whose moons are lost among a dust of stars...
Meanwhile, the creepy insect's seconds hand
runs its feelers round the rim in endless
endeavours to find an outlet, always
frantic, dainty, heavenward steps towards