Time warp

Mirror maze

This poem was written some time ago, it's in my first collection, The Spaces in Between (2015). When I read it out recently at an event I realised it may have meanings that I hadn't intended, and I found I was looking at it afresh, so thought I'd share it on here.

Whatever feeling, thought or emotion we want to get across as poets, we can never really know that our work is received as we wish it to be by readers and listeners. The title of my collection has multiple meanings for me, and this space between the writer and the reader is one of them. The reader's/listener's role is beyond the writer's reach.

Now, several years after writing 'Time Warp', I am seeing a different meaning in this poem to the one I intended at first. A rather strange feeling -- and an appropriate title for that! 

Time warp

Light stabs at angles of her mind

as a hall of mirrors distorts and turns.

She is walking away from herself –

can she be moving forward?

As she finds a passageway

reflections tilt and slant.

She looks at her echo in the glass,

sees some other thing, with empty eyes;

travels back through cracked parallels,

but where she returns is not the place she left.

The people have the same faces,

but they are not her people.

They don’t ask who she is, no-one can

help her now, she is too far away.

A bird flies through the room,

she hears its wings whisper, and

in the tail of her eye she sees a dove

draw a new barrier.

No going back, they are separated.

She is out of time.