The Hiatus

It was, they said, a conjecture,
a supposition, no more than that,
something that might have explained
a few perturbations they'd found
in the movements of things in the sky.

Suppose, they said, a hiatus...
The universe might have stopped for
- for a what? - a second? an hour?
a decade? millennium? more?

Problem then is: when it stopped -- 
that is to say, for the time it was stopped
there was no time at all. Time failed to exist.
It was stopped for exactly 
zero time. What, therefore,
we all of us now need to know, is this:
if no time passed
for the time it was stopped,
then did the universe stop - or not?
Where did
the time go
that was nowhere
around?