STOP WATCH

Quartz movement.  
It doesn’t matter
how you make 
or measure minutes.

Half an hour
could seem eternity,
or nothing.  A void.
Eighteen hundred seconds
could have been the longest, fateful wait
for those still at the boarding gate.

It was three hours
more before the crew,
then passengers, knew
the flight would end in flowers.

Quartz movement still
on the watch face.  Going on, 
when hope, but not the watch,
has stopped.


1990s
revised February 2015