The grandfather clock seems overgrown.
A blackness on its roof, unfurls
yawningly,
into the shape of a cat.
Its ticking, has two tones
( it's marched breathing echoes in marbled floor room )
loud, loud, soft rhythm
nectar of sound shaping vision.
My body is half its length
have measured its growth against this ticking cylinder,for years
waiting
for the green uniform to return.
Always, an expectation
in the daughter half body
that he would not arrive back.
Sat in the marble dome, back straight against it's wooden embrace,
the ticking timekeeper
helped me decipher his spidery script
laid out in letters from lands unseen.
But he did not die.
Fathers have no right to death
while children wait.
Gifts came from the strange places he protected.
No blood on the green uniform
it was fresh
and smelled shiny.
About this poem:
An exploration of heightened anxiety. Time moving forward ( represented by the clock,) are vehicles which give picture to worry , very often - a hopeless feeling towards something over which we have no control- the moving forward of our moments.
Here, the child lacks knowledge about her father's whereabouts. It is an adult 's reminiscing about a vacuum of absence; in this case, the child's mother had died when it was two years old, so the anxiety is coupled with latent questions about loss
