The Clock

image by crilleb50

Day in day out, wherever I go,
I carry my clock with me.
Seconds, minutes, hours of my life,
it tells them all,
it beats and strikes and sometimes chimes.

Made to the highest specification,
by a Master Clockmaker,
it pleases me but seldom.
Today, the pace is wrong,
too fast, too slow.
Relentlessly, the clock ticks on.
its tempo never varies.

Today I plead with it to take its time,
to stay the hour of departure,
to keep my loved one by my side,
for happiness to last a minute longer.

When pain and sadness visit, it beats too slow for me.
I want the time to fly, the misery to end,
the hands to move around the face at twice the speed of light.

The clock was with me when my father died and
mother left her place beside the hearth.
Each step I took away from home into the world beyond,
was marked in stately progress by my clock.
When love was new, when marriage joined two hearts for life,
When children came and went,
when hair turned grey and backs grew bent,
when summer turned to autumn,
my clock was by my side.

Just now and then, it stutters, falters,
its rhythmic beat disturbed by unknown hands.
The Master Clockmaker probes its workings,
a little oil, a touch, a a tightening of the springs,
and off it goes, the mechanism wound once more.

One day my clock will stop,
and when it stops, it stops for good,
no power on this earth can make it beat again.
I know I’ve used it well and when I hand it back,
I’ll say,

‘Returned in gratitude;
I took great care of it,
but now it's time to rest the hands.
It wasn’t me who broke it.
The clock has stopped, all by itself.'




The Mag No. 189
Tess Kincaid’s Prompt for Sunday, Oct 6th, 2013
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