Another Year // Mwaka Nyingine -- February 21, 2012

THE HOURGLASS // Eleanor Griplas

Sitting on the beach, thinking of the now and the “to be”

Plunging my hands into the sand

I cup them and dig spade like into the warmth

My fists become crude vessels clutching an uncontainable cargo

Millions of grains of soft sand are held for an instant

Before they start to cascade, spill out

Slip through and over my fingers,

And If I was to scoop again I couldn’t be sure

to pick up exactly the very same grains that I held before

most of them would be gone, scattered in a sea of lost identity

I try to slow down the torrent, squeezing my fingers tight

But still a steady stream escapes and cannot be stemmed

Of course I am not the first to observe the symbolism

Between the grains in my hands… and the passage of time.

Who coined the phrase -Time is slipping through my fingers ?

An image in my head.  The identical inverted bulbs of an hour glass

measuring distance and speed of a ship, the passage of hours

the boiling of an egg, the regulated trickle of sand

as a dependable and hypnotic measurement of time

As the grains fall, another year is clocked and another passes

Sand gives me a tangible connection with the long gone past

My sand carpet used to be a solid, a rock, a whole

Now the rock has become a blanket of tiny specks, minute particles

Fashioned over time from constant contact between two surfaces

The powder like grains can be felt in every crevice of my fingers

My knuckles, palms, nails, sticking to my skin

It seems like the grains consume me, won’t let go of me

I can’t brush them off completely. I don’t want to

Yet nor can I embrace the sand in my arms and cherish it…

This reminds me a little of you and me and the “can’t do’s”

A thought then occurs, we have our own secret hour glass

The grains in which are seeping, but not quite fast enough.

When the top of the hourglass is empty, you promise me

We will be able to grasp it as one and turn it around together

But for now we stand apart and just watch the sand falling.

We don’t know how long it will take for the top glass to be void.

I am asked for patience, to give gravity more time.

You say, it will be just another year or a few and that

the hourglass must empty, as Newton discovered and then

yes then, it will be our time but not now… another year