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The Widow Time

The widow Time left her mark on me.
She slipped something in my tea
then got to work with her needle:
a tattooed scar of what she could have done.


6 April 1991
 

I’ve always been fascinated by grammatical gender. German computers are male; Spanish computers, female. Russians call their homeland ‘Mother Russia’ whilst Germans talk about the fatherland and the Portuguese somehow manage to combine both genders (Pátria Mãe).

 

In the UK we generally view time as male, Old Father Time, and I’ve no problems with that but I was thinking more of the Fates when I wrote this. The names of the three Parcae were Nona, Decima and Morta and they all deal with the thread of life in different ways: Nona spins the thread, Decima measures it and Morta cuts it. When people talk about time though it’s rarely in a passive way; time does things to us, it wears us down or it can heal us (it’s not all bad). Time always leaves its mark on us though: wrinkles, grey hairs, missing teeth, regrets, guilt, pain of all kinds, scars both literal and psychological. No one gets away unscathed.