re:Virals 539

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. In the host chair today is Shawn Blair. This week’s poem, chosen by co-host Melissa Dennison is:

   
still attached
to the old days
a watch on a chain
—Ernest Wit
World Haiku Review Spring 2025

Introducing this poem, Melissa writes:

I chose this senryu both for its simplicity and complexity. When reading I found it to be a clever play on words, with the watch still attached to its chain. I remember holding a silver pocket watch from 1904. It had belonged to my great grandfather, but unfortunately no longer worked. When I hold objects that have belonged to another I always wonder what their life was like. My great grandfather was a dock worker – did he wear this pocket watch to work? Would he have stood on the dock looking at this as he waited for a ship to arrive and unload? Objects can tell so many stories. This verse is about time then, the concept and our experience of it. It suggests a feeling of nostalgia, and a sensation of time folding back on itself, perhaps even time travel. There is much to unpack in this and I hope you enjoy reading!

Host comment (Shawn):

I wonder about that pocket watch. I’ve seen them in movies and antique shops, and I knew a man who wore one with his three-piece suit back in the 1980’s. I was a teenager by then, old enough to be struck by the oddness. There was a mismatch between this man and the world around him.

My father owned a stopwatch. We timed our training runs up the mountain and back. That stopwatch felt good in my hand—I loved to hold it. It was made well and had the heft of a smooth round stone. The second hand clicked while it kept time, and in my memory, I could feel each of its movements in my palm. It was stored in a small box, in a pouch made of felt.

The timepiece in this verse doesn’t merely illustrate an idea or concept. The watch is a particular watch, with its own rich existence as a physical object. I imagine the poet finding it in an attic or being impressed, as I once was, by the unusualness of a person wearing it. In any case, there are worlds connected to that watch.

Urszula Marciniak:

Attachment to the past can be pleasurable, although to some extent it can block our steps into the future. Everyone likely has old problems they don’t want to revisit. However, this invisible chain can be difficult to break. Sometimes the consequences of past actions make it impossible.

Often, however, we willingly entangle ourselves in this chain—one tug and we are free. We can move on. Sometimes someone from the past holds us captive, and we walk as if chained. We don’t want to upset anyone.

Let us boldly enter new times. Let the past be a pleasant or instructive memory. And let the chain be a mere decoration. Let our time pass slowly, like in childhood.

I tighten my grip on my grandfather’s old watch. He had time for everything and didn’t rush.

Richard Straw:

This poem resonates on several levels, the first two of which might be rather obvious.

On a literal “face-value” level, this poem is saying that the watch itself, given that it’s attached to a chain, continues to fulfill its original purpose—that is, to be a stylish way for telling time. Such a timepiece is not only functional, but also a fashion statement. And the timepiece may continue to be useful, too, as long as the watch’s mechanism still operates.

Secondly, on a slightly deeper and metaphorical level, a watch on a chain can represent to me (or remind me of) someone I’ve known, perhaps the original owner of the timepiece, who may have been a relative or a friend or even myself. Watches on chains seem to be less common than they used to be, say, 50 or so years ago, which makes those who own them, or once owned them, either old-fashioned or fairly old or dead, someone like a past incarnation of myself or my father or a grandfather.

I might come across such a timepiece as a forgotten heirloom buried in a dresser drawer or pick one up out of curiosity in a pawnshop or jeweler’s store. If so, the timepiece might remind me of a person who lived in a different era that was probably not as hectic as our current age with its cell phones and precise digital watches. In such cases, a watch on a chain becomes an artifact of nostalgia right alongside other articles from the past, such as a monocle, a walking cane, or a rotary phone.

Finally, at another deeper level, a philosophical one, this poem is saying something very simple yet profound, at least to me. As long as I’m carrying around a watch on a chain that’s also a working timepiece, I have corroborating proof, or at least an auditory reminder, that I’m still alive. Such a moving timepiece, acting like a living emblem, tells me that the old days have never disappeared. Indeed, the old days are every living second that has passed up to and including those from yesterday and today. Such a timepiece, through its steady “tick, tick, tick,” provides a tangible link to all of my lived days, hours, minutes, seconds. It offers reassuring evidence of my existence, much like the steady beats of my heart.

But a watch on a chain must be wound now and then and cleaned. All of our hearts must be maintained, too, and looked into periodically to keep them beating and to encourage them to tell us what we need to know but often forget—that we’re “still attached to the old days”—at least for now.

Radhamani Sarma:

In a fast-moving world, “run for your bread” is the motto. Consciousness of time is vital for all purposes. For record-keeping purposes: wedding, thread ceremony before marriage, interview date and time, date of birth and death, hospital admission and surgery and various such, time is essential. Grandfather clocks, pocket watches and wrist watches have had their time. The wrist watch provides a quick way to see the time. Modern methods go a long way, living in a world with “no time to stand and stare”.

This haiku points to the elegance of a watch on a chain, weaving a contrast between the contemporary and ancient, allowing space for readers to wonder why it is so.

The pocket watch was not merely for fashion and show, but also offered convenience. A study reveals that the wrist watch concept came into being with the advent of modern times. I have heard my grandmother telling about sundials and huge grandfather clocks on the walls of the rich and affluent. Still attached / to the old days, the exuberant modern youth of the golden chain, the bright ambience and brand that speaks of his lineage. There is the adage “the old order gives place to the new”—now it is reversed, and the modern adapts the old to suit the convenience of the user: a lady’s chain watch, or men’s pocket watch or ornamental watch for special occasions, the time factor is yet essential. Time runs, man also runs along with time. At times, man runs faster than time, beyond his calculus.

Is it modern man’s dilemma or privilege, his watch attached to a chain, to the old days?

Alan Harvey:

What a charming, nostalgic poem by Ernest Wit.

Line 1 is still attached and acts as the pivot even though it comes first.

Every generation in line 2 is attached to the ‘good old days’ and the watch is attached to the person by the chain in line 3. It’s easy to visualize an ol’ gent reaching into his pocket and pulling out his gold watch.

We’re attached to the old days like a watch is attached with a chain. Simply stated, simply understood. Bravo.

Sudha Devi Nayak:

The poet here is on a nostalgia trip, “memory mixed with desire”. Life, in the end, if we reflect is but a long memory of cherished moments, all that we had known and loved, even the sad moments with their tears and pain. As the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk says “It is the recounting of memories turning the past to the present that makes life”. A chain of memories with attendant emotions binds us to the past as securely as the chain to a watch.

Without memory, without attachment, time itself would be a blur with no past, present, future, hopes, dreams or the will to carry on. The sun-spangled childhood, the spacious afternoons, the misty mornings we spent, the autumnal tints and spring breezes we loved—these would forever be lost to us.

Nostalgia and longing are legitimate and powerful emotions which lead us to revere the past and value memory.

Great literature, art and music are born of attachment, our unbreakable links with the past that help us to cope with the present and dream for the future. In the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon I came across the “Poetry Stone” inscribed with the haiku “Here, miles from Japan, I stand as if warmed by the Spring sunshine of home” (koko ni kite Nihon no haru hi teru gotoshi, Shuoshi Mizuhara). This is what the present haiku also conveys.

Orense Nicod—an embodied sense of duration:

Relativity tells us that time is experienced differently depending on frame, motion, and gravity, and thus time is not absolute or universally shared. In the poem, “still attached” introduces relativity at the human level. Time here is not ticking objectively. It is experienced, weighted by memory, tradition, and habit.

The old days are not simply earlier. They are closer or farther depending on one’s frame of reference. For someone immersed in digital time, the watch may feel impossibly distant. For the speaker, however, it remains immediate, even intimate.

The watch on a chain represents an older belief in absolute time as something fixed and measurable, therefore identical for everyone. The poem’s genius is that it never says “time,” “tradition,” or “history,” yet because of the metonymic richness of the image these concepts are present by contiguity. The image carries enough weight, enough metal, to ground the subsequent metaphor and make it feel earned rather than imposed.

What is particularly elegant is that this poem about our relationship with time obeys relativistic principles. Its meaning shifts depending on the reader’s temporal frame. No one reading cancels the others. They coexist, just as in relativity no single frame has priority.

Read from nostalgia, the poem can feel elegiac. But it can also be humorous. The watch on a chain may appear cumbersome, a self-aware anachronism. There is room for self-deprecation here, and this lightness protects the poem from reactionary longing. The attachment does not feel ideological but human. For me, the image might also quietly invoke the figure of the dandy, who is deliberately out of time. The dandy wears time rather than submitting to it, cultivating anachronism as style rather than doctrine. Ironically, in order to resist utility the dandy aestheticizes one of its most disciplinary symbols. Pocket watches were instruments of synchronization, and in the old days railways, labor, and empires depended on them.

If we shift the frame and read from modernity, the poem becomes critical. The pocket watch on a chain is often romanticized, but chains also carry the weight of enslavement, patriarchy, rigid social hierarchies, and imperialism. They can gesture toward enforced temporal discipline through industrial labor and colonial timekeeping. Seen this way, “still attached to the old days” becomes ethically unstable. It can be read as a warning that attachment is not neutral. What we inherit includes injustice as well as meaning. The poem exposes the ambivalence of being tethered.

From here, the poem can also be read as a critique of linear progress myths that allow societies to believe they are past certain failures. The chain stops being merely a tether to the past and becomes a looping mechanism. Chains do not only connect. They repeat links. In this sense, “still attached” can signal not memory but recurrence. Under this lens, the old days are not behind us. They are returning. The watch does not measure progress so much as rotation. What seemed obsolete comes back altered but recognizable. It is difficult not to think of current events, lost ground for women’s rights, the resurgence of overt racism, imperial ambitions, obscene wealth inequality, and more. Old rhetorics, old exclusions, old violences, old power structures reassert themselves under new guises. This recurrence is echoed structurally in the near-rhyme assonance of days and chain. History does not advance cleanly. It swings, like the dangling watch. Unresolved structures re-emerge because they were never truly dismantled.

If we change the point of view again and read the poem from futurity, it transforms once more and becomes transitional. The chain does double ethical work. It also echoes a chain of events, a chain of transmission. It can sustain tradition and meaning as much as it can constrain. The poem is not only about attachment to old time. It is being read across a historical threshold where time itself is being recoded. “Still attached” only has force if attachment is no longer the default. The phrase presupposes a rupture. There is a now in which such an object no longer naturally belongs, and a then in which it did. “Still” becomes precarious.

This brings to mind clock-face illiteracy, the fact that more and more young people do not know how to read an analog clock. Analog time is spatial, interpretive, and inhabitable. It comes with an embodied sense of duration. Today, on our smartphones, time is abstracted and algorithmic, syncing itself invisibly across devices and dissolving into notifications and feeds. Time stops being something you carry and becomes something that surrounds you, or even consumes you. It is something you are told, not something you read. This is not anecdotal. It marks a profound epistemic shift, and a dangerous one in terms of agency. The etymology of “watch” reminds us that before it named a device, it meant to stay awake, to keep guard.

The poem refuses to moralize or judge. It simply enacts its topic with clockwork precision, revealing more and more facets that are equally supported by the text. This alone makes it an impressive poem. What makes it truly fascinating for me, however, is how fully it enacts its concerns through structure.

Subject delay creates what is often labeled a false cut, yet subject ambiguity prevents the poem from resolving cleanly. The fragment is both attached and not attached to the phrase that precedes it. The subject, the watch on a chain, does not settle into place. It dangles.

This structural suspension produces iconicity, where the poem’s shape and syntax mirror its subject, and performativity, where the poem does not merely describe its insight but performs it. In this way, the poem recreates a moment of consciousness rather than representing one. Attachment and detachment are not merely described. They are experienced. For me, this brings Wit’s poem squarely into the realm of the masterful.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Orense Nicod has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.

Poem for commentary:

     
the box to check
that I’m not a robot—
winter rain
—Cherie Hunter Day, Frogpond 42.1, 2019
(Museum of Haiku Literature Award)

Footnote:

Ernest Wit on Haikupedia
Ernest Wit’s Haiku in English blog.
Ernest Wit’s Haiku po polsku blog.

re:Virals is co-hosted by Shawn Blair, Melissa Dennison, Susan Yavaniski, and Keith Evetts (managing editor).

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