Time
passes
by
so
fast.
When we’re young, all we can hope for is the future,
and all we can think about is how long it takes to get there.
But then
we’re there before we even know it.
And suddenly our time is being used up
and we’re losing years like coats falling from our shoulders.
And reality just hits us.
Punches us straight in the gut so that the pain keeps us awake and alert.
Because time is moving faster than we can
and sometimes it’d be so much easier to just
s
t
o
p.
Put a pause on life,
return to the good ol’ days where we had time to relax and dream and make mistakes.
But when we press play again,
the whole world has moved on without us
and we’re left alone, always one scene behind.
Our time is moving fast but
not
fast
enough,
and with each blink, the word has changed
into something new and unfamiliar
and we just can’t keep up anymore.
I started this poem by using the line “losing years like coats falling from our shoulders” from the book I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson. As soon as I read that I wanted to write about how fast time passes and how much it sucks. So far I haven’t really played around with the formatting of my poems, but this time I tried to make it kind of all over the place and never in the same place for too long to represent the effect of time. So much can happen in such a short amount of time, and if we take even a second to just breathe and take a break, suddenly everything is different and we have to run with everything we’ve got just to keep up. I think many others can agree, especially students in high school. At first, you can’t really believe you’ve made it and you take your time to get used to it, but then it’s grade 11 and you grades really start to matter and you have to properly think about the future and what you want to do with your life. And then it’s grade 12 and you’re graduating and beginning a whole new cycle of life that you have to get used to. Time is crazy and scary, yet I want it to speed up and rewind at the same time.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20820994-i-ll-give-you-the-sun
https://giphy.com/gifs/black-band-clock-gif-PxguWKos6uIyA
Dear Kayla,
Thank you for sharing such a lovely poem and I am grateful that you took the effort to express something we often do not notice and may take advantage of it and that is time passing by and we do not even notice it. I bet you have heard of the quote, “life is short, so live it to the fullest”. This quote really resembles with your poem and it constantly reminds me of that quote over and over. It is so true that time passes by like, “we’re losing years like coats falling from our shoulders”. I really admired this particular line and I learned to input a metaphor into a well-written line like you did. So, I thank you for that. Most importantly, when you linked time passing by to a high school experience and how living it and cherishing that moment – it was really captivating for me to read it and I really enjoy reading poems like that.
In terms of improvement, I would suggest you extend it longer so that I would be eager to read it more and read understand your reason to why you felt the need to write this poem. In your explication, if you told how you felt about finishing high school and how time passing by relates to you in terms of speeding up and rewinding at the same time, it would have cleared up many more ideas of yours. If you described how passing time felt like that to you, it would have given a deeper connection to your importance of time passing by to you in terms of having the dream to speed up and rewind at the same time. For one particular line, ” and reality just hits us”, if you gave more examples of how passing time can bring up realities that can hit you. I know you gave one example; that was the high school example but if one more example was brought up, it would have totally strengthened your explication of your poem.
I really enjoyed reading your poem and I hope to read more of your wonderful writings in the future and keep up the great and hard work. Keep going!
Sincerely,
Ayesha Mateer
Dear Kayla,
I really loved this piece by you, I loved how you explored the idea of time and how it passes us by. I found it to be really relatable in the sense that I also feel that time is going by so fast and there isn’t enough of it.
I think that the way you structured your poem was a little confusing so I recommend that you do it in a way that may help the poem to flow better, because with this structure I thought that it hindered the flow.
In general I really loved this poem because I can see you stepped out of your comfort zone with poetry with it, and I cant wait to read more of your future posts.
Sincerely Aliza
Dear Kayla,
Awesome job on this piece! You did a great job with the formatting, and I loved how you used the element of time speeding up, to demonstrate how life can be too short. I also can relate to the feeling of time not being long enough. Life can be a whirlwind sometimes, and you really demonstrated this in your poem. I also really enjoyed how you took quotes out of “I’ll Give You The Sun” To enhance it altogether. I really like the line you used from that book and you did an amazing job of showing what it could really mean.
If anything you could make this a bit longer, and extend on your already beautiful ideas! Amazing job, and keep up the great work!
~Caprice