Time is our ignorance. – Carlo Rovelli, from Reality Is Not What it Seems

Cotton candy mist hovers over the schoolyard

and dissolves in dawn’s incandescent mouth,

the order of time resolves

in the heat of the moving world.

Sunshine on the sandbox swallows the echoes

of footfall and half-forgotten freedom

before the ringing bell,

before the classroom taught the child to hope for escape,

before the hourglass became his ignorance and his prison.

©Jedidiah Paschall