Hourglass | a poem

(photo credit)

Time is a funny thing, isn’t it? When you’re in the middle of a long school day or work shift, it goes tediously slowly, and yet when you’re having fun with your friends and family it goes in the blink of an eye. I was thinking about time as a concept the other day (I overthink everything, by the way), and it occurred to me that so many people recently have been saying “this year’s going so fast already! As if it’s already March!”, and it seems like people say this all the time. Whatever month, year, time it is, people ‘can’t believe it’. Yet every single Monday you complain and say you want it to be the weekend. In winter you wish it would just be summer. We spend our lives wishing time would go faster, that event you’re excited for would arrive, and then when these things come and go we’re left wondering why time has gone so fast. It doesn’t make any sense. Well, it doesn’t to me, anyway. The way I see it, you can spend your life wishing time away or you can enjoy the little things in every day.

So I did what I tend to do when I think too deeply about something, wrote a poem about it. I found it incredibly hard to put my feelings into words though, and I’m unsure whether I’m completely happy with the final product and whether it sums up the message I was trying to convey, but I did my best. I don’t like to explain every aspect of my poetry to people before they read it, because I like people to take their own meanings and interpretations from it, so I’ll let the poem do the talking. Hope you enjoy!

‘I can’t believe

it’s March already!’

Yet you wish for the weekend,

long for blazing summer,

count down the days

until school’s out,

you’re free.

Then why are you so surprised

when time flies?

The sands of time

flow through the hourglass

grain by grain,

no more, no less.

A moment can be spent

fretting, worrying, fearing,

each speck building

until the egg timer is reset.

One grain of sand

could tip you over the edge.

Smash the hourglass instead.

Spend those moments

laughing, exploring, learning,

because time stops for nobody.

Stop wishing time would fly,

embrace every grain of each day.

It would mean a lot if you let me know what you thought of this poem in the comments, and once again thank you so much for reading, x