Watching her younger brother play ball, the speaker of "Times for Remembering" sees two boys at once: the athlete in front of her and the small child she once sent into a wall. That double vision drives the poem. It starts in the present, with pride and a small ache at letting go, then gets pulled backward by sweat, practice and a game of ring around the rosy. It ends up at the memory it has been circling all along: a night in the emergency room and staples in a little boy's head.
The opening image is a boat. The brother "will be set sail in the wind," and the sister admits she "can no longer hold you back." The metaphor makes her a mooring rope, and letting go is the loving thing to do. The image then slides into "choosing your own path of life," as if sea turned to road halfway through the sentence. That slip feels more like a young writer reaching for big images than a flaw, and it gives the opening an unforced sincerity. "Playing the field" works well on two levels, since it is literally what he does and also sounds like freedom.
The first memory is full of light. The children zigzag through "golden crops," with stalks "3 feet above our heads." The detail is exact about a child's-eye view, where ordinary plants become a maze. The speaker slips from "we" to "you" ("This was where we would find you"), which suggests a hide-and-seek in which the little brother is the one being found. The sweltering sun and the sweat on his skin now link the old field to the new one, so past and present overlap.
Then the weather changes. "Rain would fall out side the window," and the sunlit field is replaced by a room with a "solid plaster" wall. The hard sounds of "solid plaster" land like the impact itself. The scare quotes around "fell down" matter too. Falling down is the built-in ending of the game they were playing, yet here it names an injury. Innocent rules and real harm meet in two words. The line "I always threw you" is also unsettling. "Always" could mean the game was rough every time, or it could be the guilty mind stretching one night into a habit.
The grammar stumbles at the emotional peak. "You were the brother I always protected / and now I wasn't the one to hurt you" is knotted and hard to pin down, as if she can't phrase it cleanly. The protector who failed is the sharpest tension in the poem. Then comes a striking verb: sending a child "to earn staples within his head." Staples are not earned, yet the brother now earns bruises and fitness through practice. Judging by the word choice, the speaker links his hurts then and now, and her unease is that pain once came from her instead of from sport.
The form fits this honesty. The poem is one unbroken block with no rhyme and no steady meter. The long, talky lines run on like someone telling a story aloud, and the light punctuation lets thoughts spill into each other. The repeated words do the structural work: "always" appears in the protecting, the throwing, the memories that "will always come," and the closing plea to "always remember." The plural "times" echoes the title in "times of joy" and "times gone bad," which are the two halves of the poem's memory.
The ending turns guilt into a promise. She cannot guarantee he won't fall, so she redefines what an older sister is for. She will be there "for the times gone bad," someone to talk to "when theres no one else to speak with." Protection moves from preventing harm to being present afterwards. The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It doesn't excuse the accident or turn it into a lesson, and it shows how love and responsibility can mix with lasting regret. The result is quiet, domestic and believable, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has watched a sibling grow up.