When Time Was Kissed

By Al Konda

In orchards washed by lunar fire,

Where elder tales lie listening in the leaves,

She bowed her brow; the dark became a lyre

And held its breath for what the heart would keep.

The heavens hushed—no comet dared to roam—

As if one sigh could summon worlds back home.

 

Her breathing spun a pale, unbroken seam

That stitched the rifted midnight, edge to edge;

It trembled like the first-born thread of dream,

Drawn tight along the shadow’s granite ledge.

And in that hush the constellations stared,

As though they’d known the name of what she bared.

 

For what she shed was no brief rain of pain,

No hour that breaks and vanishes like foam;

It fell with the long patience of a plain

And found, in falling, an enduring home.

Each bead became a vow the earth could keep,

A river taught by grief to never sleep.

 

It wandered through the chambers of the years,

Past ruined thrones and cities turned to sand,

And carried in its clear, uncounted tears

The weight no mortal tongue could bear or brand.

The dust of ages swirled, yet could not hide

The shining ache that traveled in its tide.

 

It cut the cliff where stubborn silence clings,

And wrote in stone what tongues forget to say;

Not with a sword, but with the gentler things—

With water’s will that wears the world away.

So mountains learned the script of loss and grace,

And held her sorrow in their ancient face.

 

And still, when night kneels down in temple-dark,

And groves grow bright beneath the listening moon,

You may feel memory kindle like a spark,

And hear the starry choir resume its tune.

For in her weeping, time itself was kissed—

And what was mourned became what still persists.

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There are sorrows that pass through us.

And there are sorrows that remain long enough to change the shape of what surrounds them.

This poem moves inside the second kind.

The weeping here is not collapse. It is consecration. It does not dissolve into self-pity or spectacle. It falls with patience. It becomes river. It becomes inscription.

The blade does not appear.

Water does.

Not to flood the world, but to wear it.

Grief, when endured rather than dramatized, gains weight. It begins to carve. It teaches stone to remember.

The image of the river is not ornamental. It is moral. It suggests that what we refuse to name still travels. What we bury still moves. And what we mourn, if carried long enough, becomes part of the earth’s structure.

When time is kissed, something changes.

Not in the sky.

In endurance.

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REFLECTION

This poem presents grief as formative rather than destructive.

The central motion is not eruption but descent. Each tear becomes vow. Each vow becomes river. Each river becomes landscape.

The poem rejects the language of spectacle. There is no thunder, no judgment, no collapse of heavens. Instead, the transformation happens through patience.

The river is the governing metaphor. It does not conquer stone. It reshapes it through constancy.

The closing image—what was mourned becoming what persists—reframes loss. It suggests that sorrow, when fully endured, ceases to be absence. It becomes presence in another form.

Time is not undone.

It is altered.

And what remains is not noise, but continuity.

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© Al Konda · The Poetry Elite