Does

Time Fly?

Does time truly fly - or does it sit idly?

Time certainly seems to be ephemeral
Yet this question is not to be posed lightly
For what we establish from this quandary
Will change our notion of the world we live in,
our inner being and outer boundaries
Another day now starts new, early, and bright
The sun rises over the mountains afar
Pushing back shadows of the retreating night
Time takes a breath and springs to life, now anew
It rises, carries the world on its shoulders
The cities and the places hard to get to
It steals away curiosity and youth
It plunders their sureness and their confidence
Until all that remains is the bitter truth
It fills lives with nostalgia and regret
With ideas and dreams that never came true
A lifetime of mistakes they cannot forget
Finally, it hands them over to their fates
To their endless torment in the dead of Hell
To the heavens above and its pearly gates
Is Time really that - tirelessly moving on?
Perhaps Time never really moves at all
That which is cursory is not really gone
The past, the present, and the future combined
All events occurring, all warnings heeded
All inputs acknowledged, all viewpoints opined
A mere illusion - just a trick of our minds
Time is flashes in a stream of consciousness
A limit by which our esprit is defined
Life and death are one, wealth and poverty, too
The winners and the losers are all the same
So are the crowds of many and groups of few
So time flies like an arrow - or perhaps not
Nobody's quite certain just how it works
It is more perplexing than anyone thought
From steppes to plains, from prairies to savannas,
People have always doubted how Time flies, but
One thing is true - fruit flies like a banana.

a quandary by
Caleb Xu