A Poem about Old Man Time

Time

by Callula Xu

Years slip past like minutes,
Now even millennia are seconds,
Mere seconds!
I am old by your standards,
But I am quite young in the universe.
You would know me by a false name,
Old Man Time.

I am here, but not there.
I am there, but not here.
I am many places,
I am also nothing.
I heal your hearts of grief and sorrow,
I also steal away your years,
I am a concept to you,
Yet I am not merely a concept to others.

You make laws to bind me to your primitive minds.
You hasten to restrain me,
To try to tame me.
It is foolish and useless.
For you to bind me,
You would have to understand
That I am not a concept,
But your fear of the unknown restrains you.
I have never seen a sillier,
More foolish species than you, in all my years.
Living in fear created by yourselves,
Always restrained.

I am Old Man Time to you,
But you cannot grasp the immensity of the universe,
For you define everything with false names.
You struggle to create chaos in the world,
But you bring in peace much more slowly than chaos.
This is the imbalance,
I predict,
Which will destroy your species.
Finally, a day to look forward to.

Callula Xu is a nine-year-old prodigy who speaks Mandarin at home and English in her Bay Area (CA) middle school. With her vivid imagination, she has already had two children's books published. God and Nature columnist Walt Hearn was so struck by her astoundingly adult vocabulary and use of words that he has contributed a Foreword for a forthcoming collection of her poems. 

C.S. Lewis "On Being Human"

On Being Human
By C. S. Lewis


Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature.
They discern Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us -
An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
—An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.