The Time Gardens

It was once upon a silent spring,

On a starless night, with no beginning,

Where all but every light did lie

Asleep upon the moonlit sky,

And the hedges and the ferns

Were enclosed to learn,

Of what they had kept

In the Gardens of Time,

And of what limits they chose

To encircle this shrine,

Before the bells had arose

And decided to chime.

Before every second and minute

Did crash and resound,

As temporal grains that fall to the ground,

Who sleeping and creeping

Their way through the game,

Slide into the dusk, where all is the same.

These glasses of dust are kept in the trust

Of the old phantom reaper,

In the skeleton grin, of Time’s secret keeper;

Who surveyed and sedated

The forces he fated to wander this lawn,

As they search through the gardens, for where they belong,

Where marble slabs are formed in steps,

To where the queen and king must get,

As they wander the meadows, just to forget,

Of how they had entered the slumbers of Time,

And dreamt on the stages, of a great pantomime.

Where over yonder, the house on the hill,

Does witness the night, so silently still,

Where outside the gardens

The golden gnomes see,

The roots of their homes

In the nest of every tree.