A lull in the conversation

The amount of talking going on
had become a bit much,
so a woman took out an hourglass,
set it on the table
and began to watch the fine black sand
fall through space
as the others fell silent
and returned to the stillness

In her bag she always had
a few hourglasses,
filled with black sand for silence,
a selection of different sizes:
a five-minute hourglass,
a half-hour hourglass,
a twenty-minute hourglass,
an hour hourglass

And sometimes
when the space between words,
between sentences,
between turns in a conversation
was not enough,
when a lull in the conversion would be nice,
the woman would silence her guests
with an hourglass
for a while