Song for a Watch Repairer
Saima Afreen
Beyond the horizons of red butterflies
Lies seashore of your eyes
with hour glasses sleeping softly
they were filled with moon dust
That pagan goddesses exhaled
With Galileo you, too, counted threads of light
Till they became stars, till they were hours
breathing in glasses of Marsala.
Broken on ships of cinnamon
Docked on radium harbours
There was Rome on your wrist.
You dissected Ship of Theseus in tiny wheels
That stopped with the stirring of spoon in your tea-cup
Till your bones glittered.
Rescuing lost minutes, seconds
lands, sands grinding with splinters
of grandfather’s clock
that Dali may have painted on a blue tree
it’s raining the way it may have rained
in Vietnam when Bible-believers smoked it
Rose quartz and its street were of the same hue.
The sparrows
Flow out through the cracks of skin
To mountains of dust on your table
At whose legs the sun has set
To find its fire, its kingdom…
