Image: ‘The passing of time’.
A knife-carved, medullary ray-balancing figure In end-grain oak, around 25mm tall, illuminated by the raking light of a work lamp.
GRAIN
To measure and work with reverence due
on balancing beams of light and shade,
to strike a line through old and new,
Alone, the mark no one has made
Life by a thousand cuts composed
Of guided ways to futures planned,
each relayed thought in turn supposed
As movement of the baton hand
The passed, the thing of shapes to come
transposed in form and frame of mind
all aspects joined, the gathered sum
dispersed once more for change to find
The scene before from seen before
To often rhyme but not repeat
From Wells of then and now we draw,
ever the causal Twain shall meet
By jack and block, through temporal plane
raise up, share on the given prime
directive of the shifting grain;
there is no present like the time
IC
The words ‘poem’, ‘poet’, and ‘poetry’ all trace back to the Ancient Greek verb ‘poiein’ which means ‘to make’ or ‘to create’.
And so, through this most appropriate medium, I offer a personal view of the interplay between the conceptual phrase ‘the passing of time’ and the title word, ‘grain’, in its various guises.
Shaped by internal factors and external influences, it is ‘grain’ as the visible structure in wood and stone; the passing of time marked by line informing line, layer imposed on layer – each the same but not the same. It is ‘grain’ as innate character – the natural human tendency to seek and receive creative stimuli from others. ‘The passing of time’ as the handing over of knowledge accrued, to be carried forward by and in the lines and layers of artists and builders to come. It is grain, viewed in the hourglass as the abstracted accumulation of experience turned to possibility, to new lines and layers – each the same but not the same.
Copyright © 2026 Ian Cresswell