Time With You
As I move through the days of time
I move in time closer to you.
Growing in the knowledge of you is gain.
Another treasure I could never find.
Time with you I measure by the moment,
for our time is moving fast.
There’s never enough time to share,
so I make what we have last.
Very precious is our time together,
what we have is fleeting as vapor.
I hold you in my arms then it’s over,
only a memory of you now.
I find you worthy of the cost of time.
I gladly pay the price.
For the wages of our time together,
is love and paradise.
The second poem turns from anticipation to reflection — a man examining what time with Priya actually costs and what it returns. Scott measures their time not in hours or days but in individual moments, each one counted and kept. He names the fleeting quality of what they have not with resignation but with the deliberate choice to make it last and the conviction that the wages of their time together is love and paradise. It is the collection’s most meditative poem and one of its most theologically resonant.
I wrote this poem as a man aware that time is the most honest measure of what a person values. Every moment I spend with Priya is a moment I have chosen above every other available thing. That is not a small statement. The final stanza arrived as a complete surprise — the wages of our time together is love and paradise — and I recognized it immediately as the truest thing in the poem. I meant it without qualification.