The sundial sleeps in the overgrown glade
Its numerals worn by the years they've stayed
Your name once carved in the mossy stone
Fades where the ivy has quietly grown
Twilight lingers on its copper face
A moment suspended in silent grace
While the shadow you cast in our borrowed noon
Stretches long
but vanishes too soon
Measure me in the light we stole
Where time unwound its rigid scroll
The garden whispers through rusted gates
Of hours that love could not translate
The missing sweet stone of the arc we
drew A perfect circle I walk without you
We planted seconds like tulip bulbs
In soil rich with the maybes and nubs
Now December grips the frozen brass
Each number a ghost in the frosted glass
The cardinal points have all gone astray
True north
dissolved in the milky way
Yet the dawn still licks the ancient
rhyme Etching your absence in stolen time
The sundial dreams in its lichen shroud Voices of us laughing loud
We were spring's brief defiant creed
A season love could never need
So
I'll tend the plot where the wild time grows
And let the ivy hide what the sundial knows
For every dawn that dares to break Finds your shadow in its wake
A silent tongue,
a step past life
That love still lives where the light goes to die