Count-time
Count-time - fact Summary
Rooted in Imprisonment Experience
This short poem uses a nighttime prison-round image—the guard counting bodies wrapped like the dead—to evoke imprisonment, isolation, and the slow passage of time. After the guard leaves, the metaphorical bodies stir, performing a solitary ritual of counting lost days and memories. Natural and animal images (sand, mountains, elephants, waterfalls) amplify exile and buried interior life, suggesting endurance and the private, dreamlike ways inmates survive confinement.
Read Complete AnalysesEverybody to sleep the guard symbolizes on his late night tour of the tombs. When he leaves, after counting still bodies wrapped in white sheets, when he goes, the bodies slowly move, in solitary ritual, counting lost days, mounting memories, numbering like sand grains the winds drag over high mountains to their lonely deaths; like elephants they go bury themselves under dreamlike waterfalls, in the silence.
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