The passing of pauses down
Of alert alacrity, in watchful frown

Granting the ken to our kin
Of the waste, the war within

The woe is to wind
To what we all find

At the end of our days
The passing of the rays
To what beyond horizon lays

The leave to black
Never to come back

Tools to keep time
Legible; to refine
Keep straight the line

From past to present
To futures more pleasant

To keep the hope from the horror
To keep the lack from the more

The gift of times keeping
The watch we keep, weeping
The seconds keep leaking

As tears down cheek
That want the sea, and seek
Communion with the deep

What do we leave behind
But the past we lost to time
To memory, resigned

We watch it fly by
And mark it with each sigh

In sweep of hands
In hourglass sands

As a heart keeps its rhythmic beat
What is precious is it continues its feat

And what, in pausing, would die
As a fragile miracle ceases to fly

We keep watch, and wait
For futures to come; for fate
For the past is always too late

We wrangle the wild into hand
Stretched and contracted, as a band
Into discrete measures, the desert sand

Taming the dry dunes
Into rock, into runes

The infinite moment into minute, hour
Marking as it passes, in it's measure, power

Over the subjeciveness of our lives
This control of chaos, in truth, lies

In these watches passed down
Civilization in a paper crown

Human hubris in outlandish degree
To name the numinous by decree

If we had but eyes to see
A life lived, expanded fractally

Within completeness, contains all
Yet we divide it, to watch it fall

To pieces, spent, rent apart
A once beautiful, whole work of art
Watches kept, talismans against the dark

© inkcloud