Explore the poem

How often is ‘time’ repeated, including the title? This poem tries to hold onto time as it whizzes by. The repetition of the word ‘time’ tries to insist we think about it.

The repetition of ‘time’ also helps to give the poem its shape. There are four pairs of lines called couplets. Each couplet tries to define time for us by comparing it with a living thing. Take a look at how that works in the first 3 couplets. How does that change in the final couplet?

If you can create a performance of the poem with another person, one of you could say the first half line and the other could complete the couplet. On your own, try pausing after the first half line.

Take a look at the rhymes next. Try stretching these words as you say them them so the sound lingers longer.

How else could you use your voice to slow down time and the poem just long enough for your listeners to think about it?

About Valerie Bloom

Valerie Bloom was born in Clarendon Parish, south Jamaica, and moved to England in 1979. After studying English with African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, she began to write poetry. Her first collection Touch Mi, Tell Mi was published in 1983. Bloom, like many of her contemporaries from Jamaica, often writes in a literary version of Jamaican patois, a rich and creative language, with English and West African influences, that emerged from the troubled history of British enslavement of African people. Many Jamaican writers, including Bloom, use the full range of language available to them, sometimes choosing to write in Standard English, sometimes drawing on Jamaican patois and sometimes both.

Bloom writes children’s poetry and picture books and has also worked as an editor and lyricist. She often writes about family and explores elements of Jamaican or wider Caribbean culture. Bloom believes in the link between poetry and music and was raised in an environment with a strong oral tradition – storytelling, songs and reciting poems. Bloom is a skilled performer of poetry, and regularly reads at festivals and in schools both in the UK and internationally. In 2008 she published her second novel The Tribe and was awarded an MBE for services to poetry. Her most recent collection of children’s poetry, Stars With Flaming Tails, was published in 2021 by Otter-Barry Books.