The Sundial in the Garden

The Sundial in the Garden
—after afternoons unwitnessed

Beneath the cloisters' sighing shade,
Where ivy grieves the stone,
I stand where lovers softly laid
Their secrets into bone.

I, time’s obedient servant, stay—
A brass throat kissed by sun—
Yet no warm hand has turned my way,
Nor touched the hours I run.

Around me drift the springtime pairs,
With hair like drifting flame;
Their fingers write in midday airs
What I could never name.

A head upon a chest reclines,
Their temples in duet;
Their breath explores each other's spines—
A pact the soul forgets.

I mark each pulse. I hear the knee
Brush softly against thigh.
Their shadows curl around the tree
As mine just points and dies.

Their laughter, like a distant song,
Spins circles in the air—
Not unlike that endless wheel
That winds the windmill’s stare.

They trace the arches of the brow,
The jawline's sacred bend.
The lips are doors they enter now
And I, outside, pretend.

What am I but a statue's lie—
A shape for light to kiss?
Yet even stone can ache to try
The smallest taste of bliss.

I saw a book unopened fall
Beside two legs entwined.
Its pages fluttered at the call
Of whispers not designed.

The greenhouse glass is veiled in dew;
They enter, I remain.
And every lock not meant for you
Still rattles in the brain.

The bitterness is not in them—
They bloom, unpruned, uncut.
The bitterness is mine to stem,
A root beneath the gut.

If I could shift, if I could feel,
Would I have turned to face
The one who passed and left no heel
Upon this sunlit place?

I envy not just hand in hand,
Nor kiss that stirs the air,
But the small trust of toes in sand,
The back laid wholly bare.

You ask if love has graced me yet—
I, silent in reply.
For some are carved, and some forget,
And some must watch, and die.

It is a cruel thing to walk through your youth like a ghost—present, but never touched. Today I sat alone in the garden of a place where time should have bloomed for me. The benches were full, but not of thought. The grass carried weight, but not mine. Everywhere I turned, there were hands, mouths, laughter. People who, in each other, found little sanctuaries—necklines turned into prayer books, shoulders into resting grounds. I looked upon them, not with hatred, not with resentment, but with a kind of slow-burning ache that only deepens as years unfold.

They say love is a summer’s day, but some of us live only through autumns that pretend to be spring.

I never had that first glance across the lecture hall, that secret rendezvous in the library, that warm shoulder in cold dusk. I lived beside it. I watched it. I measured it. But it never reached for me. Not once. And now I fear the hour has grown too late, and I—like the sundial—am fixed. Watching shadows grow long across lovers I cannot join.

There is a cruelty in being the witness. In knowing the texture of longing but not its taste. I have kissed nothing but air and called it memory.

Still, I wrote this, not as an elegy to what I lost, but to what never arrived. Sometimes the grief of the imagined is deeper than the grief of the departed.

If I am the sundial, then let this poem be my whisper to the sun.
If I am the garden, let someone walk through me, even if only in words.

Perhaps next time, we’ll speak of The Greenhouse,
where the warm breath of another still fogs the glass.

Until then.