My Father’s Wristwatch by Niels Hav

I wind up my father’s old wristwatch.
For almost three decades it has been here in the drawer
waiting to be thrown out.
This was the watch that was on him when he worked
with animals and stone and earth.
It is scraped and scratched by the things
he grappled with, like no other watch you would see today,
browned by stale sweat.

Struck by something primitive, a feeling,
I take the watch from the drawer and wind it up.
The second-hand forges briskly ahead.
Super Shock Resist is engraved in tiny letters
on the dial. I keep my eye on the hands,
somehow it feels encouraging
to see the old watch resurrected from the dead.
The hands keeping up, the time spot on.

When my father was my age, he was in the churchyard
eight hours a day. Now he is there permanently.
He left behind him a few stone dikes, five children
– and this watch

For seventy-five minutes the ghost watch gleefully races
the modern digital clocks in the house.
As though time really were cyclical, reversible.
Until, for all that, my father’s watch suddenly
stops again. Immoveably. Definitively.

What is there to say? I put the watch back
in the drawer. Someone else can decide.

Photography by: Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash