The Grain

Word Crafters Wednesday Prompt:
The Big Things/The Little Things

Ocean vs. A Grain of Sand

The Forest vs. One Leaf

Write about the ocean or a grain of sand. Write about the forest or a single leaf. It can be anything great or anything small, and if you want to fancy write about both.

The Grain

I give myself permission to slide over others; 
To fall through narrowness; to be buried by others.
There is nothing but waiting.
There is nothing but a slump,
Then sliding, then sifting beneath.
A narrow neck; it sometimes hisses
All is silicate, time is clear as glass.
I give myself permission to be Time itself
Its body, its breath, its blood.
Over and over, 
I forget the stillness in motion,
Forget stasis in a slide.
It seems that I have become
As small as any eternal second.

I'm usually the one that uses EVERY SINGLE PIECE of the prompt; not today. There is something satisfying about sand, its sharp softness, its weight, the way it retains heat and shape. And time, if the hourglass has its use. Back in the day when telephones were firmly attached to land lines and often to the walls themselves, my parents bought a phone timer. It was an hourglass encased in a thick layer of acrylic (or glass) that was intended to keep you from staying on the phone and running up long distance charges or just taking up the single family phone line for hours. I can remember the weight of it, the sharp edges of the acrylic, the silent slither of the tiny sand grains through the narrow waist. I'm not sure if we ever used it for the phone, but I know that I was mesmerized by the falling sand in a completely different way from the anxiety of a timer counting down. 

-- Chrissa