The Watcher of the Silent Clock
Where vaulted shadows weave their ghostly lace,
Stands Horloge, vast amid deserted spheres,
A titan wrought by cold mechanic grace.
Its hands—the arms of Time’s relentless chain—
Slow pivot in the chamber’s breathless gloom,
Each tick a pulse of joy entwined with pain,
Each tock a step toward an unseen doom.
There dwells the Quiet Watcher, veiled in haze,
The Observateur du temps qui s’efface—
A ghost beneath the clock’s unyielding gaze,
A soul confined in Time’s encroaching place.
His frame dissolves like mist at dawn’s first gleam,
His shadow fades as fleeting moments fleet,
A man who dwells beyond the realm of dream,
Yet bound in mortal chains, incomplete.
He sits beneath the colossal face sublime,
Its numbers like the eons etched in stone,
A universe contracting in a rhyme,
The vibrant pulse of all he’s ever known.
His eyes, twin wells of ancient memory,
Reflect the gears that grind and gently weep,
And with each measured turn, a faded story—
The lives he watches never cease to seep.
“Ah, Time,” he murmurs to the silent air,
“Thou art the sculptor of our brief estate,
A painter of decay beyond repair,
A sovereign draped in garb of cruel fate.
How oft have I beheld thy ceaseless flight,
This steady march that steals both breath and bone,
Yet here I tarry in perpetual night,
To count the hours that make me most alone.”
The chamber’s echoes answer but in sighs,
A choir of whispers conjuring the past,
Where human hopes like fragile vapors rise,
Before descending to the void at last.
Once, lovers danced amidst the painted walls,
Their laughter ringing bright as silver bells,
Now silence cradles all their broken calls,
Entombed within these hollow, ghostly cells.
He watches still, this specter of the clock,
Whose mortal threads dissolve in quiet grace.
He is the witness of Time’s final knock,
The fading shadow of a vanished face.
His heart, a fragile instrument of glass,
Shattered beneath the weight of years eroded,
Each pulse a toll that whispers, “This shall pass,”
Yet nothing stays, and all is thus corroded.
Within his mind, a garden once did bloom,
Petals of joy and sorrow intertwined,
Where youth’s bright fountains chased away the gloom,
And promises were threads by dreams designed.
But seasons turned, and frost and flame conspired,
To strip the branches bare of all belief,
And in the void, his spirit is retired—
A broken lock in Time’s unyielding reef.
The hands above move steady, slow, and cold,
A metronome of ceaseless ebb and flow.
They mark the stories no man dares to hold,
The faces lost in Time’s relentless snow.
And in that note, a melancholy tune,
A dirge for what was cherished, now bereft,
The fleeting gleam of some forgotten moon,
Whose waning light leaves all the world bereft.
“Why must you watch,” he asks the dim-lit void,
“As memories dissolve like morning mist?
Do you not yearn to be again employed
In lives once warm, by tender hands kissed?”
No answer stirs the dusty, hollow air,
No balm to heal the ache of endless years.
Only the clock’s slow footfall, cold and bare,
Repeats the ache, the torment, and the tears.
His voice, a fragile echo in the hall,
“Is there no mercy in your endless game?
Must all we cherish crumble, break, and fall—
And leave behind but sorrow, loss, and shame?”
The clock’s great face, forever impassive,
Reflects no answer in its stony gaze.
Its hands, like fate, pursue their course massive,
Oblivious to hopes or mournful praise.
Through endless nights the Watcher sits alone,
His breath a fading whisper in the gloom.
A man who knows the bitter, cold unknown,
Encased within the Horloge’s vast tomb.
His soul a page in some forgotten tome,
Worn thin by grief and punctured by despair,
His heart a clock undone, bereft of home,
Ticking to rhythms only Time can bear.
Once, in the light of dawning hope’s embrace,
He dreamed of days beyond the ticking hand,
Where moments bloomed in soft and gentle space—
Where Time did bow beneath a softer land.
But dreams, like autumn leaves, were swept away,
And left him counting shadows, lost, alone.
His solitude, a requiem each day,
In this vast hall where time and silence drone.
The Horloge stands, unwavering and tall,
A monument to human frailty,
Its iron heart the witness to the fall
Of fleeting dreams and fragile mortality.
Yet in this timeless vigil it sustains—
A sacred pain that all the ages share,
The bitterness that in each loss remains,
A cruel whisper caught upon the air.
So fades the Watcher, image worn by hours,
Dissolving like the mist upon the glass,
A shadow bound within the ticking towers,
Until the final moments come to pass.
No herald stands to mourn his fading name,
No mortal voice will mark his quiet flight.
He vanishes into the endless frame—
The silent slave to ever-dimming light.
And in that vast and echoing empty hall,
The Horloge moves: relentless, cold, and grim.
Its hands still point, though none remain to call,
The twilight song of Time’s eternal hymn.
Yet, through the stillness lingers deep the ache—
Of all that lives, and all that slips away,
A sorrow taut, like thread upon a break,
A heart unwound beneath the dying day.
O mortal soul! What grief does Time impart,
That bids us watch while all we love decays?
What bitter art that carves the human heart,
Till only hollow echoes fill our days?
The Watcher fades, his vigil at its end,
Forever lost beyond the final chime.
And thus, in silence, Time and man descend—
Bound by the melancholy dance of rhyme.
