The Keeper of Time

Her house echoes with the music of clocks
that mock the measured movement of her days,
and she hears in them the prim passage of time,
the metered progression of moments delayed.

The hands ridicule her hesitant heart,
her complacent crawl through the circle of years;
and the pendulums swing to a somniferous song
of roads never traveled and a life never lived.

And the tick and the tock of her collection of clocks,
with their chorus of melodious chimes,
is but a constant reminder of dreams left behind her
before she became but a keeper of time.