I’ve recently headed back to London to meet up with old friends and spend time with my family. Two of my oldest friends, Lois whom I met when I was 7 at the Church my family attended in West London and Rebecca, whom I’ve known since my first day at grammar school, met me at the Science Museum for a day. We all love Space and spent a considerable amount of time in the ‘Exploring Space’ hall where ‘The Clock of the Long Now’, also called the 10,000-year clock, is kept. This is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years and the two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London.

August brought us together;
colliding microcosms in the Hall of the Cosmos,
South Kensington.

As Hebe pokes buttons with sticky fingers
I remember the one in the pews
and the other in an icy school annexe.

Time’s hands tick tricks on us all;
as I find myself questioning  those childhood beliefs
and I still have to learn to look at an empty sky
and no longer believe in trees filled with angels.

Can God really stay constant?

The Museum looks different from how I remember it
and our bodies tell tales of 105 years of living.
‘The Clock of the Long Now’ stands unmoving before us
but in those milliseconds we have changed again
and somewhere in the universe another path has been walked
another fate has been dealt
and what comforts me in moments like this

is that change can be hard and unforgiving

but what remains constant is me, you and you.