The Mariner’s Hourglass
Where waves forgot their hymns and turned to dust,
A mariner wandered, tethered to the curse
Of ceaseless tides that never kissed the shore.
His skin, a parchment scrawled with salt and years,
His eyes two lanterns dimmed by endless night,
He traced the dunes—a sea without a name—
And whispered to the wind, his sole companion:
“How many moons have drowned within this void?
How many stars have frayed like sails unstitched?”
The desert stretched its ribs, a beast asleep,
Its golden spine aglow with borrowed time.
No compass here, no North to bend the soul,
Only the sun’s white eye, unblinking, cold,
That etched his shadow shorter day by day,
A sundial counting doom in phantom hours.
He clutched a locket, rusted shut by years,
Inside, a face—now blurred to ghostly grain—
A woman’s smile, half-eaten by the green
Of tarnished silver, memory’s slow decay.
Then, on the eve when twilight split the world,
A murmur rose—not wind, nor sand’s lament—
A voice that spun from nothingness a thread
To weave a figure clad in spectral light.
She stood before him, veiled in twilight’s gauze,
Her hair a storm of raven-winged despair,
Her gown the hue of midnight’s deepest sigh.
“O traveler,” she breathed, “whose soul is etched
With maps of sorrow older than the tides,
Why chase the horizon’s ever-fleeting smirk?”
He froze, the locket burning in his palm,
As if her words had kindled dormant coal.
“I seek the shore that fled my vessel’s wake,
A home that crumbled like a shell in storm.
The sea, once mother, turned a ravenous throat;
It swallowed crews and clocks and every chart,
Left me to drift where time forgets to flow.”
Her laughter, soft as dunes that shift and mourn,
Unraveled years within him. “Foolish heart,”
She sang, “canst thou not see? This desert *is* thy sea.
Look—where the mirage bleeds its liquid lies,
There once rolled waves that knew thy vessel’s name.
The sands, they are the bones of drowned regrets,
Each grain a second slipped from fate’s clenched fist.
Thy home lies not ahead, but far beneath,
Where all thy yesterdays are buried deep.”
He fell to knees that sank like anchor’s weight,
The truth a blade no scabbard could contain.
“Then what of thee?” he pled, voice cracked and thin,
“Art thou some phantom sent to mock my grief?”
“I am the echo of what time erased,”
She sighed, her form a ripple in the heat,
“The love thou left to wilt on distant shores,
The vow unmourned, the letter never sent.
I am the moment’s ghost, the chance untaken,
The path that frayed when thou chose storm for guide.
Look on my face—see how the years have gnawed
The features thou once swore to hold eternal.”
And as she spoke, her visage writhed and peeled—
A rose devoured by the locust-hours,
Till naught remained but shadows, stark and lean.
“No!” he cried, hands clawing at the air
To cage the light that slipped like mercury.
“If thou art she, then let the sands reverse!
Unbreak the vows, unspin the sun’s descent!”
Her voice now mingled with the sirocco’s wail:
“The hourglass admits no mercy, fool.
Each grain must fall; the past is but a scar
Etched deep within the flesh of crawling years.
To love a memory is to kiss a ghost—
Thy breath gives life to phantoms, not to men.”
He clutched the locket tighter, felt its edge
Bite deep into the flesh of his despair.
“Then let me fade as well, if fade I must—
But not alone, not in this nameless waste!”
Her form dissolved, a sigh in dusk’s embrace,
Yet left behind a single scarlet thread
That coiled around his wrist, a fragile tether.
“Follow,” it hummed, “the weave of what remains.”
Through nights that dripped like tar, through days of glass,
He trailed the thread toward oblivion’s edge.
At last, he found it—cradled in the sands—
A shipwreck’s ribs, half-swallowed by the void,
Its mast a splintered bone against the sky,
Its hull a tomb for barnacles and thirst.
Within, the thread led to a captain’s log,
Its pages blank but for a single leaf
That bore her portrait, fresh as morning’s blush—
The face inside his locket, now restored.
Beneath, in script that pulsed with living light:
“All love is but a voyage through the hourglass.
The sand will fall; the voyage still remains.”
He pressed the page against his hollow chest,
And watched the sea reclaim its wayward child—
The dunes surged up in waves of hungry gold,
Engulfed the ship, the log, the scarlet thread,
Till all was still beneath the sun’s blind gaze.
Some say the desert sighs his name at dusk,
That locket sometimes glints beneath the moon,
A fleeting spark where two lost timelines crossed.
But time, that thief, strides on—and steals the proof.
“`
