The Town Where Clocks Stopped After Grief

The Town Where Clocks Stopped After Grief

Nobody noticed when the clocks first failed,

The baker simply laughed and closed his shop,

The children kept on running through the streets,

Assuming broken hands would soon restart.

Then funerals began to last too long,

Mourners standing silent without end,

Candles burned for days without melting down,

And evening never fully seemed to bend.

A widow claimed she heard her husband breathe,

Though he’d been buried nearly twenty days,

She swore his footsteps echoed through the hall,

Returning every night the selfsame way.

The doctor’s hair turned suddenly to white,

After he checked the body of a child,

He locked himself inside his surgery,

And left behind a letter stained and wild.

It said the town had somehow slipped from time,

Trapped inside the moment grief arrived,

Every broken heart became a chain,

Keeping all the sorrow there alive.

People tried escaping through the woods,

Yet every road curved slowly back again,

Travellers entering after sunset vanished,

Never once returning home to friends.

Years passed though nobody appeared to age,

The flowers bloomed exactly as before,

Mothers waited by untouched bedroom doors,

Still expecting footsteps on the floor.

Now strangers avoid the town at night,

Though sometimes distant church bells carry through,

And every clock inside abandoned homes

Still points to when the mourning first came true.