Ella Duffy

Finding Time

You repeat the same minute

in the low alarm of a fly.

Time is all the same to the fly.

Time is all the same to the fly.

Several days become rust.

The weather rains a year in a month.

Moss hoards a decade, was it?

Stone takes a century

to ignore your question.

Ella Duffy is the author of Greencombe: A Poem in Paths (Hazel Press, 2024), Rootstalk (Hazel Press, 2020) and New Hunger (The Poetry Business, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She is the editor of botanical poetry anthology, Seeds & Roots (Hazel Press, 2022) has been a guest editor for Butcher’s Dog and Magma.

Ella said this about her poem:

I had been thinking about other ways of measuring time. We can hear a minute pass in the ticking of a clock, but the repetitive buzz of a fly is not so useful. It just is. In looking to the more-than-human, the poem became about finding time rather than measuring it. Time, it turns out, moves differently depending on who, or what, is keeping it.