Watersheds of the Afternoon

When time runs
in the watersheds of the afternoon
like water drops down a window pane,
light is changed, sinking slowly,
sliding downhill to evening.

Day is slowly released.

Had there been a morning,
a waxing, a dawn rising?

Where was hope lying
like a cloud behind the sun?

Time in the morning, its tide rising,
lifted to full flood, work to be done,
effort swelling like a promise.

But then noon swivelled the sun
back under cloud, heaved his arc
into downward.

So heat having built its wall
across the early hours, cooled its fever,
let its eagerness go humid and hazy,
let the daylight relinquish itself
to coming night.

So we hurry on,
pushing the task before us,
like a round stone,
against gravity, uphill,
only in the waning mythology
of the afternoon, in the fourth hour
letting sleep arrive and the stone slip
rolling from our hands.

© BH, 1985/2017/2022

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Looking through a folder of past files labelled ‘DONE’, I stumbled on this from 2017, apparently unfinished. On first re-reading it certainly seemed unfamiliar - and yet… So I searched for words and phrases among poems I’d saved as finished or blogged somewhere.

I found Stones, in a form which, to me, made it feel like a companion poem, not an edited version. There are shared phrases but the story of each is very different.

I’ve re-edited this now, not changing the words, only punctuating and altering the line ends. Reflecting the different effect.

Now you can judge which is the better ‘version’ or whether each is a different poem…