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Two Poems: "Through the Hourglass" and "Subduing Spring"
Literary Issue: Poems by Jillian Josefsberg
“Through the Hourglass”
For now measured time slips quick through the glass—
I sit, a grain yet unready to pass–
the world which once seems so steady,
is slipping. I am not ready.
The faces of my youth
blend, blur, into untruth.
Youth’s vigor’s bled.
Childhood’s dead.
Evil won?
Now live!
The world looks new.
“So strange, I grew.”
Yet all is old, but flipped,
and rosy world is stripped.
I rest on sand that will subside,
And once I loved those who now hide:
but dead we’ll be the newest foundation
of this slipping sand’s next generation.
Together we are time–take my hand, smile,
and walk with me once our hour’s last mile.
”Subduing Spring”
That soft soil gives beneath my touch,
displaced by green springs signaling
something new, foreign, familiar–
and as green takes root, old dies.
But what is death?
Is it unknown?
I’ve known this earth
before, a child
with eager breath,|
waiting, for grown
green to give birth
to plants tame & wild
and those flowers
that bloom with rising
sun, so I woke
to see before
darkening hours,
dark disfiguring–
dark evening cloak–
dark which soil bores–
and the child who
waits for pink blooms
saw the sun set
on sweet spring days,
on petals’ dew,
even time’s loom–
she paid her debt
and buried fays–
with seeds she slept
and shared their doom–
youth’s days too few.
And now? Those seeds are gone, time’s touched
their shells. But now? Signaling
that old is new, familiar–
in the now, in the present, rise the futures–the past always gives.