Mike Stone's "Kohelet Revisited" starts from an old idea, that life moves in seasons, and then quietly declines to be comforted by it. Kohelet is the Hebrew name for the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, and the poem's middle lines echo its famous claim that there is a time for everything. The title promises a return visit, and what the speaker finds on the way back is two scenes of human extremity and an honest admission that he cannot say what hour it is.
The poem is built like a hinge. The first half is two memories, each introduced with "Once I saw." The second half steps back into plain statement. The memories are strikingly physical. A soldier leaps from behind a boulder and runs "zig-zagging toward / A forest," while bullets kick up "small plumes of / Hot dust around his flying boots." The language is almost pretty: "plumes" and "flying" make the danger look light, even balletic, as if the speaker could only take in the moment as a vivid picture. The second image is stranger and sadder. A woman stands "precariously between / A sliding mound of soil and / A gaping hole in the mown lawn." The neat, mown lawn contrasts with the raw hole. Her "high heels and black dress" are wrong for the work, and the mention of black suggests, though the poem never says it, that she is burying someone. She shovels the dirt in herself, as if grief had left her no one to hand the job to.
The form carries the feeling. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, only free verse in which the line breaks do the work. In the soldier's scene the lines end on small, unfinished words ("toward," "that," "of," "and"), so the sentence keeps tumbling over the edge of each line, much like a runner who cannot stop. The woman's sentence does the same, sliding down the page like the soil. Then comes the poem's most important break: the single line "Her wet eyes unseeing," set apart in its own stanza. After all that momentum the poem stops, and the stillness hurts. The word "unseeing" also answers the speaker's repeated "I saw." He watches the scene, and she, in the middle of it, cannot see anything.
The second half changes the language completely. The sentences are short and balanced, almost proverbial: "a time to be strong / And a time to be weak." The next pair twists the pattern. "A time to hide your strength / And a time to hide your weakness" suggests that the real skill is not being strong or weak but knowing which to show, and when. Here the earlier scenes become hard to sort. Is the running soldier brave or frightened? Is the woman who keeps shoveling strong or broken? The poem's own phrasing suggests she is both, and the soldier may be as well. The seasons the Bible lists tidily arrive in life all tangled together.
The last two lines turn the poem's central word. "You ask me what time it is" can mean the clock, but in this context it also means the season of life, the moment in the Ecclesiastes pattern. The speaker's answer, "I don't know," is flat and unadorned, with no flourish to soften it. He does not reject the Bible's claim, since the poem still says "there is a season for all things." What he gives up is the ability to read the calendar from inside it. Someone who is running under fire, or burying a person, may not be able to tell which time they are living in.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It is short and modest, but it takes an ancient text that can sound like a comfort and tests it against what the speaker has actually witnessed. It leaves the reader with the questioner's own uncertainty rather than a neat answer, and the poem seems to suggest that this is the more truthful place to end.