Lifespans

[Wjames]

A minute’s a day for mosquitos,
a month is a year for a dog.
An hour is ten breaths for a redwood,
a life is a wink for a log.

[Sparkydashforth]

I like how this does not Tell, but simply states.

A minute’s a day for mosquitos,................................tempting to muse on time here, but you resisted.
a month is a year for a dog........................................this could be accused of being obvious, but what makes this work attractive
is its obvious observations.
An hour is ten breaths for a redwood,.......................Time is relative --- maybe an aunt or a nephew
a life is a wink for a log..............................is the log alive, lets say yes and no....maybe two winks

Enjoyed

[Mahjong]

[bThis is wonderful.

A minute’s a day for mosquitos,  [b]Being plural this could refer to the species as a whole (phylogeny), whereas the other three are singular (hence ontogeny).  Maybe 'a mosquito'?  If the point is that time is relative, this is so only from the perspective of the human experience of time, of which there are many but here seems to be tied roughly to abstract time and the individual lifespan (dog is obvious; I haven't done the math for a mosquito, but a quick google search puts your calculus in the ballpark, though there is 5-6 fold gender difference)--something that the log nicely accentuates with its wink of shadenfreude at the otherwise ineluctable fate to which living things are bound (having lost its life in a 'blink', it's in a position to give us a "wink").

Thanks for posting!

[RiverNotch]

Proverbial. Though ending on a log feels redundant -- there was a sense of outward movement that was just stopped dead by that last line. Something else -- I keep thinking God, but that might make this too didactic (especially against Creationists) -- still, the perfection of the rhyme is expendable. Lovely work.

[Wjames]

Thanks for your thoughts.

The plural was really just for the meter, but I also rarely think of mosquitos & insects as singular.

I wanted the log to represent death (a dead redwood), I don't know if it works, though. If I read it without knowing my intentions, it might seem like actually being the "life" of a log.