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12 June 2023

Posted by Tabby Hayward

Time Is Like...

This week we were looking at poetry about time. We began by looking at the attached similes for time (the 'Time is like...' doc) and each writer picked one which appealed to them and free wrote inspired by this:

By Wil: Chosen quote - The peacefulness of grass, which clothes, as if with silence, deserted
plains that once were loud with strife.

The beauty of resentfulness doth lay there for the man and the woman.
As it bares in arms of conflict, which may have a quarrelled it’s suiter but not it’s owner.
The moon and the stars co-align with one another as it’s he who judges not mine.
But the Sun glossing in the rings and the pit of despair, as its maker continues to strife forward and
abandoned all atonement.  

Then we looked at the poems 'On Time' by Milton, 'For many hours there's been an old couple standing at that window' by Alice Oswald, '2.1' from 'Repeat Until Time' by Hannah Sullivan and discussed how the different poets showed time speeding up and slowing down in the poems, and how they seemed to think about time in the poems.

Then, inspired by these, the writers wrote their own poems about time (which could continue from the free-write from the quote, or use one or more of the poems as inspiration).
--

By Wil:    Time is a ticking time bomb

Time is a ticking accolade; you are the bomb. Tick, tick, tick, like a clock in a tower. Will you be
cutting the red wire or the Green? Or is it left entirely in someone’s else’s fate? Will you proceed
with this pressure as you don’t know when it will go. Do you make the most of it, as it beeps and
bleeds continuously till your last breath. Will you service it justice and pour out your time to others
and help build a construct that demonstrates that prefect sanity that others can follow. Or will you
take it IN the wrong way as you inhale and exhale the terror, nauseous and diluteness of hate
around you, cowering in fear. Would it be fair if you cut someone’s else’s wire and see where they
stand? Only you can control what is in front of you. Who knows maybe God will great you at the
pearly white gates when this is over? But think to your self have I done good?

By Eve: flux 

time is a train and you

are perpetually on the wrong platform

watching the wrong trains stop, then wait, 

for a while, and then a lunging stream of people on

and off, all with the voices of your mother, father, et cetera 

and all of a sudden, you feel scolded, a menthol heat

against your cheek as the train leaves, its electric passing

through you and out the other side, and all you can do

is watch yourself unwillingly bend around it, molten limbed,

as it roots itself into your shadow, and then the next wrong train

at the next wrong platform stops, and then waits,

stay a while, it says, and what choice do you have,

the coffee has gone cold. there’s nothing else you can do.
---

By David: 
Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further we make it go. 

No notes only coins, weighed down by copper, silver, few gold. 
No paper in my pockets, just low denominations, if truth be told.

Half pennies, half crowns and the odd shilling, shopping wrapped in paper 
from the Butcher, Greengrocer, Ironmonger and Fisherman.

At a checkout now, beep, beep, beep. 
A few pounds, 10p here and some coppers I didn't want to keep.

Unexpected item in the bagging area, I know it's a bag. 
Stuffed full of stickered items, half off or more means that
polymer note might last one day more.

Clink, clink in the coins go, 
I will take the receipt and off I go. 


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