On The Clock Comments

A beautiful poem on Nature.Well expressed Well done Col Muhammad Khalid Khan

This is so wonderfully observed and brilliantly conveyed; and the natural details are beautiful in a way that doesn't all attention to itself and thus are all the more affecting than an overstated gushing could possibly be. But BEAUTY it is! and the plentitude is head-spinning in one moment and very calming the next. Iknow that I will enjoy re-reading this in a moment but first my impression upon first reading. I felt a shiver of delight when I read in stanza 6 that amazing line VEHICLES RACE BY / AT THE SPEED OF GLISTENING SUNLIGHT (WOW! what a striking description of motion - it's worthy of one of those futurist poems of the 1920s which worshipped the new technology of speed) and at that moment it hit THIS IS WHAT NIKA SEES AT WORK! and a stanza you finally identify the receptionist - I'm only going to have that surprise once but it's memorable... But there are so many things I will enjoy on later readings, like the unfolding of the sights you see almost like painted panels, each one topping the beauty of what before it. There's a stillness in this part of the poem (before the SPEED OF SUNLIGHT takes over!) and we can contemplate much as you are - with a sense of leisure, time enough to draw in all the loveliness our eyes can hold. I won't quote directly, just identify stanzas 3,4, & 5 as among the most felicitous natural descriptions I've read in living memory. Part of the wonder of the natural scene is that it is so intensely focused as you peer down a corridor visible from your desk. We observe the scene in the same way. So beautiful.