Mak Cov:
(stylised as ‘MaK Cov’).
Appears to be a Scottish poet who publishes work on Hello Poetry, a platform for sharing poetry.
August is the Sunday of summer. I wish we could turn the hourglass over.
Just as Sunday carries that particular ache of a weekend running out — still technically free time, but shadowed by Monday looming — August carries the same feeling for summer. It’s still warm, the days are still long, but everyone can sense the end coming (school starting, fall approaching). “I wish we could turn the hourglass over” extends that metaphor: the speaker wants to reset time, to get another full measure of summer (or of the relationship) rather than watch the sand run out.
Origin:
It comes from amateur/user-submitted poetry rather than a famous literary source — it’s attributed to a poet using the name “mak-cov” on Hello Poetry, a crowdsourced poetry site. It’s since circulated widely on quote-aggregator sites and social media (often trimmed to just the opening lines), which is likely how you encountered it — but there’s no indication “Mak Cov” is a well-known or professionally published poet; the name appears mainly in connection with this one poem across the sites that quote it.
Author:
The line is from a poem by a poet credited as Mak Cov (sometimes styled “MaK Cov”), posted on the poetry-sharing site Hello Poetry. The full poem — often titled “August is the Sunday of Summer” — is a bittersweet piece about a summer romance ending, using August’s place as the last month of the season the way Sunday is the last day of the week: a beautiful stretch of time you can feel slipping away even as you’re still in it. The poem opens: “August is the Sunday of summer / I wish we could keep the sun forever / I wish that we could stay together”, and the line you quoted comes from a later verse where the speaker wishes they could turn back time rather than watch the relationship (and the season) end.
