When The Clock Strikes Zero

A free verse poem

Time stood still in all our good times and the bad times when we counted stars paused our nights swayed through the days drunk in the spring breeze, through the summer fall and winter and pulled together this life.

Time stood still to see me fall in love with me, my scrunched nose the curly hair and my shabby curves under the spotlight of your stage, where I fell in love with you, yours everyone else, and the clocks stopped again. I never heard them start but always knew when they paused again. Time stood still in awe of us. These clocks, they weren’t faulty. They waited for us afraid to miss out on our journeys.

A life of a hundred or eighty or sixty trips around the sun, I don’t know because we’ve lived over a million on this Earth till now.

So when the clock strikes zero and the time stands still one last time, frozen in moment with its hands will be mine holding together these lives for you forever.

© Madhuvandhi Ravi 2023

Prompt: All the ways I’ll be with you when I’m gone. Thank you, Diana C. for this wonderful and deep prompt. I enjoyed writing this one.