Time Returns Renewed

About this poem

I have been reading and reciting, and I digesting, and listening to Li-Young Lee recite his metaphysical poem, “Big Clock,” originally published in Poem-a-Day, on December 8, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets. One line of Li-Young Lee’s “Big Clock” poem that stands out so strikingly (pun not intended) and meaningfully to me, is that which reads, “Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back.” His use of the metaphor of “Big Clock” is suggestive that somewhere in our collective consciousness experience, resides the archetypal image of a “Little Clock” that we humanly relate to quite intimately, and even personally, but which, in reality, is merely a physical prototype of the archetypal “Big Clock” time that defies human imagination and understanding of the relativity of time. This poem, “Time Returns Renewed,” examines the illusive concept of time from the perspective of a recovering comatose patient. It is written in a three-line haiku stanza format, but expanded into verses to highlight and amplify the poem ‘s message of relativistic time that changed dramatically the traditionally Newtonian conceptualization of absolute time and space to the current notion of a dramatically curved space-time, articulated in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. more »