Barefoot in the Hourglass: A Meditation on Seasons, Sand, and the Spaces Between Breath

We are all autumn trees here—

arms outstretched, shedding what we swore we’d keep.

The wind hums a dirge for the leaves,

but roots remember the weight of rain.

Watch how the light bends:

burnt honey pooling in the cracks of dusk,

a fractured amber where the horizon splits its seams.

Time is an hourglass worn thin by thumbprints,

and we are the sand, grains rehearsing their fall.

I tried to count the seconds once—

tucked them like loose coins into jars labeled someday.

But the clock’s teeth gnawed holes in my pockets,

and the years slipped through, silent as moth wings.

Summer left its sticky residue on my skin,

a syrup of sweat and firefly laughter.

Now October arrives, all knuckles and bone,

knocking its riddles against the windowpane.

What do you cling to when the ground keeps shifting?

The maples shrug, their scarlet skirts swirling.

In the attic of memory, I find a child’s drawing:

a stick-figure girl chasing a sun with crayon rays.

She doesn’t know yet that light is a fugitive,

that shadows are just light’s echo, tired of running.

Winter comes, stitching the world in frost.

I learn to walk barefoot on the freeze,

to feel the earth’s slow pulse beneath the ice.

The cold is a language—it cracks, it hums, it lingers.

By spring, the hourglass flips.

The sand remembers its old paths but chooses new ones.

I plant a fistful of seconds in the garden,

water them with the silence between heartbeats.

They bloom into questions without answers,

petals trembling like unfinished poems.

And when the wind returns—always the wind—

I let it take what it wants: my name, my knots, my what-ifs.

The trees clap their gnarled hands, laughing.

Time isn’t a thief; it’s a librarian, shelving our stories

in the Dewey Decimal system of dust.

So here I am, dancing in the hourglass,

toes digging into the sands of almost and not yet.

The grains cling to my skin, each one a tiny elegy,

each one a prologue.