Tea Break

Heat cannot pass from cold to hot – the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. – Carlo Rovelli

.

Why is the past so particular, ordered,

the future uncertain, agitated?

Why is the past never past,

the future made now?

.

Now, I hold my cup of green tea

picturing myself on this blue veined earth.

I squeeze a tea bag with my spoon, freeing

waves frothing on a shore, air bubbles

captured in a sphere of hadrons

their quarks, up and down, top to bottom,

random, agitated in my spoon heating up.

.

Now, while I sit in my still room hurtling through space

on my steady chair free-falling through sky

that continues beneath my feet

            uprightly ever-turning in the way that makes sunrise,

time will tell, if I am still an I with memory,

when the tide ebbs.

*

Biography

Kevin Conroy has been published in The Irish Times, the Stony Thursday Book, One by jacar press, the moth, THE SHOp, Southword, Burning Bush II, Boyne Berries, The Blue Max Review, The Curlew, Sixteen Literary Magazine, erbacce, The Runt magazine, Skylight 47,. He has been short- & long-listed in competitions such as the Fish Poetry, Fool for Poetry Chapbook, Algebra of Owls, appeared in anthologies Poets meet Politics & Hibernian Writers and was the runner-up in The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2016. His debut collection will be published October 2020 by Salmon Poetry.