My Father’s Clock

My Father’s Clock

An Ode to an Unmeasured Genius

When night descended on our fields of grain,
And stars emerged above the sleeping plain,
My father walked beneath the boundless skies,
And read the hour where constellations rise.

No clock he carried, none adorned his hand,
No watch to mark the hours across the land;
Yet by a star’s slow passage through the blue,
He knew the time as few with dials knew.

The night was vast, the field was dark and still,
The wind moved softly past the distant hill;
Where others saw the heavens strewn with fire,
He read their movement as a village squire.

Then came the years when I was sent to learn,
To seek the truths that books and schools discern;
My brother gave, with pride and brotherly grace,
A Japanese watch to keep time’s measured pace.

A Seiko, perhaps—the name I half recall,
A tiny dial that seemed to know it all;
Its hands went round with mechanical art,
A marvel made by minds both keen and smart.

That summer, home again, I formed a plan:
To test the stars against the watch of man;
I kept the hours, but never told him why,
Nor let my secret question meet his eye.

At dawn, at dusk, beneath the midnight dome,
I checked the watch beside our fields and home;
Ten minutes more or less—his measure stayed,
And oft the dial and his word obeyed.

At times the hands agreed as if they knew
The same old law that governed stars and dew;
I stood amazed, my youthful doubts undone—
The watch had measured time; he read the Sun.

He measured distance, too, with measured tread,
Counting the ground beneath each step he sped;
A field’s long reach, by no surveyor’s art,
Was mapped in footsteps stored within his heart.

And cotton’s yield, and peanuts from the earth,
He judged with skill that mocked a ledger’s worth;
The harvest’s weight, the volume gathered in,
Came near the truth before the scales began.

No formal school had taught his practiced eye,
No printed tables charted earth or sky;
Yet years of watching, doing, standing near
Had trained his mind to make the obscure clear.

What scholars learn through figures, charts, and rules,
He gathered in the fields, away from schools;
Experience, patient, cumulative, deep,
Had taught him secrets that no books could keep.

I had pursued degrees to understand,
He had read nature with his eyes and hand;
And in that summer, silently, I knew
How much the learned may learn from those who do.

The watch still ticks; its hands have travelled far,
Yet none can match the wisdom of his star;
For time may live in gears of polished steel,
But he had learnt the heavens’ turning wheel.

O Father, yours was no enchanted art,
But observation joined to a patient heart;
The stars, the steps, the harvest, and the plain—
Your quiet science lives in me again.