Sundial Sonnets

They say every city keeps one secret rooftop, a place where the noise grows shy and the wind remembers your name. The rooftop garden above Building Forty-Three was such a place. Most people assumed the rusted elevator simply didn’t go that high anymore, but the truth was simpler: the garden didn’t want to be found by anyone who wasn’t ready to slow down.

At its center stood a massive stone sundial—older than the building, older perhaps than memory itself. No plaque explained it. No architect claimed it. Yet anyone who stepped into its quiet orbit felt the same hush, as though they had wandered into an hour that didn’t belong to the rest of the day.

The sundial didn’t just mark time. It wrote it.

Each hour, when the sun shifted at just the right angle, the long bronze gnomon cast a shadow across the stone, and where the shadow touched, faint words brightened—just for a breath, just long enough to be read. Lines of a sonnet, etched not by hand but by light itself. Nobody knew who carved them, or if anyone ever had. Some believed the stone was blank and the sun was merely remembering.

Every noon, a boy named Emil climbed the final set of metal stairs to the rooftop, lunchbox under his arm. He worked in the mailroom downstairs, a job that required more patience than joy, but he liked the quiet rhythm of it. His coworkers spent their breaks doom-scrolling, yet Emil always came here, to the only place where the world didn’t seem eager to outrun him.

He discovered the sundial by accident—one day when the elevator stalled and curiosity outran caution. Now he visited daily, as though checking in with a mentor who spoke only in metaphors.

On this afternoon, clouds had thinned to silk. The shadow moved slowly, stretching its fingertip across the stone as the hour turned. Emil leaned closer, watching the new line of the poem brighten:

“What light forgets, the heart will memorize.”

The words trembled across the stone like a living thing. Emil swallowed. He wasn’t the poetic sort, but the sundial had a way of coaxing truths out of him—truths he didn’t know he carried.

He sat on the small bench near the rosemary bush, the scent rising like warm breath. From here he could see the city’s glass towers glitter in the distance. He thought of his mother, who had once traced sunbeam patterns on their kitchen floor and told him that time wasn’t an enemy; it was a storyteller.

He had not thought of her in years.

The shadow shifted again. A second line glimmered into view:

“Each hour writes a footstep in our days.”

Emil felt the words settle into him like soft weight. Footsteps. He’d taken many recently—rushed ones, anxious ones, ones that didn’t feel like choosing but merely surviving. But here, in this little skyward garden, the hour felt like something he could walk beside, not outrun.

As the shadow continued its sweeping arc, the rest of the sonnet slowly revealed itself—line by luminous line—until the final couplet unfurled like a secret:

“When daylight fades, remember this, my friend:
Time’s tender poems wait for you again.”

The letters glowed, then softened, then vanished entirely, as though embarrassed by their own honesty.

Emil sat a long while after the words dissolved. The city below resumed its frantic counting of minutes, but he was no longer rushing to join it. When he finally stood, brushing dust from his jeans, he felt something tug quietly inside him—hope, perhaps, or simply a promise that tomorrow, at this same hour, the sun would write to him again.

And maybe that was enough.