Stones

Time,
In the watershed
Of an afternoon,
Rolls like water drops,
On the window pane,
Changing in the light,
Moving downward
Towards evening.

Daylight’s
Slow burning,
Releases the early hours
From the widening dawn,
Hope for a better day
Forming, like sky
Beyond the sun.

Time,
With the morning,
In full flood, lifts up
Work to be done,
Effort, promise rising,
Until noon swivels the sun
Under cloud, lulls its arc
Back to tired rest.

So
The heat of day,
Having built a wall
Across the small hours, cools,
Turns its fever humid and hazy;
Daylight resigns itself
To falling dusk.

But
We worry through,
Pushing tasks before us
Like round stones, toiling
Uphill against gravity.

Only
In the waning mythology
Of night, the late hours
Meet us at last to let us sleep
And the stones slip, rolling
From our hands.

© BH, 2017

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Just about time. Again. Its ebb and flow. Also about effort and its passing. Then, how the cycle of it goes on. I thought of Sisyphus and his stone, laborious and futile.

The tide made me look for an image of a sea loch to which I added stones from one of its beaches, The rain came from the internet, as rain so often does. 

Five years on, I stumbled on an earlier draft of this - Watersheds of the afternoon. It seemed, after half a decade, that the original working had its own sense, quite different from this. So now they're both here.