The Mariner’s Hourglass

Ten thousand tides had gnawed his youth, ten thousand stars denied him north,
Yet in his palm, a locket cold rehearsed the memory of his worth:
A woman’s face, half-drowned in gilt, her smile a shore he could not keep—
The sea, that ravenous archivist, had stolen even echoes from her sleep.

He dreamt of temples. Not the kind where gods in marble silence dwell,
But columns carved by ocean’s sigh, where coral hymns the depths to swell.
A labyrinth of liquid time, its spires built from centuries’ tears,
Where barnacles, like ancient scribes, inscribe the grief of vanished years.

On the forty-first night of his fasting (bread weeviled, wine turned to gall),
A mist arose—not common fog, but something older, something thrall—
It parted like a widow’s veil, revealing what no chart had told:
An isle where stone drank moonlight whole, and air was thick with stories sold.

He waded through the kelp’s green grasp, past urchins sharp as betrayal’s sting,
To find a archway, vast and worn, where sea and sky ceased quarreling.
The temple’s door, ajar as lips about to breathe some fatal truth,
Exhaled a breeze that smelled of rust and roses plucked in long-lost youth.

Within, the walls were braille for ghosts. He traced their tales with trembling hand:
Here, warriors drowned in sapphire wars; there, lovers bound by water’s band.
A gallery of absence, this—each fresco wept in salted blues,
The floor mosaicked with the bones of those who’d paid the hour’s dues.

At center stood a pool so still, it seemed Time’s mirror left behind,
And in its glass, not his own face, but hers—the one he’d failed to find.
“Elara!” roared the rafters, though his throat stayed parched as desert sand,
The pool rippled into silver shards that rearranged at fate’s command.

She stood there, real as pain, yet not—a vision wreathed in seafoam lace,
Her hair still smelling of the hearth, her eyes still holding summer’s grace.
“O love,” she spoke, her voice the sound of tides retreating from the shore,
“You chase a ghost through endless deeps, but I am not what you sail for.”

He lunged; the water burned like ice. Her form dissolved in liquid rhyme,
Yet left behind a single pearl that bore the warmth of living time.
“Return,” it pulsed against his palm, “to where our vows first kissed the earth,
For I am bound to fleeting bloom, and you to waves that mock rebirth.”

But mariners, once wed to storms, find calm more deadly than the squall—
He smashed the pearl against the stones, swore to the dark he’d break time’s thrall.
The temple groaned as centuries turned, the pool boiled black with stolen years,
And through the vortex of his rage, a voice like drowning ships drew near:

“Fool of flesh,” the abyss intoned, “you barter tears for treasures vain,
Each moment crushed to grasp the past lets slip the now between its chain.
Behold your life—not lost, but spent in chasing shadows through the foam—
The truest wreck lies not below, but in the heart that won’t seek home.”

The walls began to bleed their age. The floor cracked like a mirror’s spite.
Elara’s face in every shard—now young, now old, now lost to night.
He clutched one fragment to his chest, felt time accelerate its waltz—
His beard frosted with sudden years, his joints creaked like a sinking hull.

Outside, his ship (once prison, pride) surrendered to the hungry spray,
Its timbers singing their last hymn as kelp embraced its rotting sway.
The temple knelt beneath the waves, its final sigh a mournful knell,
While in the sailor’s petried grip, the glass showed Elara growing pale.

Now, when the moon is full and low, and tides conspire to bare their throats,
Some claim they see a figure carved where sea and stone exchange their notes.
His eyes are two eroded pearls, his arms still clutch that phantom prize,
As barnacles compose new hymns of love that drowned in its own eyes.

And in the towns where children sleep, a whisper rides the coastal wind:
“Beware the weight of yesteryears that blind the present’s fragile grin.
For time is not a thief to fight, but water cupped in trembling hands—
Drink deep its brief, bright sacrament before it sifts to distant sands.”

But out beyond the reef’s black teeth, where light submits to crushing blue,
Two shadows dance through temple halls the ocean’s patience will renew:
A woman formed of foamed regrets, a man of salt and stubborn will,
Forever close, forever veiled by time’s unanswerable until.