by Athol Williams
We are orientated blind to time’s joys or sorrows unless
we can count and weigh it, like a celestial currency;
with no existence itself, time borrows the perfume,
the shape of the sandglass we construct to rule it;
in our human days stripped of meaning the sandglass
is a measure whose place no other can fill as gracefully;
it does not declare any hour, it only counts one by one
the sands of prayer and waiting, dwindling heartbeats;
seconds speed by in dust, isolated from a life of sky
and garden and space, secluded in their vial just like
the truthsayer secluded in his cell, marking slow hours,
burying them all with truth in perfectly fallen heaps.
Inspired by an extract from ‘Life and Flowers’ by Maurice Maeterlinck
