Time is a Stepping Stone

Poetry by Fiona O’Connell

We live and have our Being in a mysterion (Greek for the eternal secret) that shows few signs of compunction for the topsy-turvy world of time. The harder we try for perfection the less we succeed. And absurdity grows apace in a field where we put one foot ahead of another in surrender to something knowing what we do not know. Yet what might have been is always coming to be in our heart of hearts.

Fiona O’Connell

Epitaph

Fiona O’Connell, author of these pages, self-published her book of poetry, Time is a Stepping Stone, in the autumn of 2013. She died on September 21, 2014, less than a month before her 98th birthday.

The Poems

Heart of my soul	Sojourner Truth	Find me	Those women in Moses’ beard…	Truth in the mouth
Sophia	Death	Disenchanted broom	Brush away sleep	Ear to the ten
The Emperor’s Men	The Fleet of it	Speak love	Pegasus	My furious broom
Soul of a syllable	Thief on the wall	Ode to an accountant	Quasimodo	Dreams in smithereens
Ananke	The mind is a swimmer	Cela va sans dire	Essence of clown	Swords of light
Asking too much of a pen?	Winter at sea	A poem of substance	Song and flight of words…	Valentine’s Day
Copper kettle	“Words are approximations”	Flippancy	If I had my way	This is not widely known
Reading in bed	In relation to a poem	Moving woman	Eyes to pole ciphers	About pitfalls and a clown
What is it like to be old?	Years hear	Aspen leaf	Accountability	Lot’s wife
Keeping watch	She dreams	Mother sea	Inner Sun	Talking in terms of time
Ask away, child	At the end of the lane	How hearts break	Eagle dream	Looking for Annie Rafferty
Rowan	“You go upstairs and read.”	Banshee	Mothering on	The Puzzle of Someday
A Book Person	No mere but scants eternity	Hag truth	A Doormat and her Lord	A Killarney garden
Willow tree phenomenon	London’s a cat…	Words	A Tree Chant

Dedicated To

Alejandro Garcia-Revilla, MD. whose medical skill gave me time to complete this work.
Thomas David Noonan, life partner of 17 years, whose spiritual view of life awakened me to the inner reality of my being, to the spirit, self, and soul that animates mind, life and body.

“The highest spiritual vision today sees in the travail of mankind the birthpangs of a higher order of life, of a new race on the earth, as the last fulfillment of her long evolutionary process.”¹

Gratitude

“Time is a stepping stone” was not print-ready when I wrote my first poem at age 14, but it’s been on its meandering way for about that long. Its delayed publication has taken place within the love of family and friends. To each one here named my gratitude for the wonder of being in my life:

To Jim Kelly, deceased husband, to our four daughters, Micaela Goldberger, Gail Kelly, Patricia Kellert, and Kathleen Kelly, to our sons-in-law, Jerome Kellert and Charles Goldberger, our two grandchildren, Megan Duffley and Jesse Kellert, and our two great-grandchildren, Molly and Annabel Duffley.
To Jonathan and Linda Lambert and to the Taormina community of friends who share in warm kindness.
To Olga Singer, graphic designer, without whose patient help this book could not have come to be.
To Peter Bellwood, writer, who chose poems from a weighty manuscript to form this book “for the fun of it.”
To Robin Van Doren who lovingly shared her insights in regard to the possible human being.
To Jean Houston for participation in her “New Ways of Being” classes in Rye and Pomona N.Y, a vibrance of encouragement.

Biography

Fiona reports that her verifiable life began in Brooklyn, NY, October 9, 1916 to Irish-American school-teacher parents. Her father taught her Mother Goose nursery rhymes in cradle days and she parroted 24 of them at 18 months. In April of 1941 she married Jim Kelly, lawyer and FBI agent. December of that year brought World War II, and the 40s welcomed four daughters in quick succession. The next 20 years saw the peripatetic menage moving 14 times from US city to city. Jim died in 1978. In June of 1981, daughters grown, she moved west to Ojai, CA. In 1989 Tom Noonan became her life partner for 17 years. In December of 2006 Tom died. In her view human beings are both subject and object of two kinds of time: the calendric visible kind and its eternally invisible opposite. And that the unseen, the forever kind of eternal time where so many of our loves are at home, is the time that woos and wins our lasting allegiance, keeps us steady and on course as we go. Her summation is that the truth of this life lives in the mind of the heart.

Anilbaran, Sri Aurobindo and the New Age, pg.70 ↩