Time, in Mary F. C. Pratt's "Times," begins as a joke and ends as solid ground. The first section is cheerfully subversive. If you need an extra hour, just announce "TIME CHANGE!" to your boss, your teachers, your dentist. The shouted capitals and the fused word "makebelieve" give the lines a mock-bossy playfulness, and the line "It depends, as Einstein said" borrows the authority of physics to claim that hours are invented. The section closes less comfortably, though. Sunrise and sunset are "precarious," balanced on "the fine rim of universal turn." The joke has opened a small gap under our feet.
The next three sections explore what that gap feels like. The speaker's wish is modest: no comet, only "this easy similarity of days." Notice how the second section dangles the word "but" at the end of a line before the question arrives, as if the thought hesitated. Then comes "Magical Thinking," capitalised like a diagnosis. To feel thankful for an ordinary day is to tempt fate, and the flat statement "This is no mere superstition" suggests the speaker half-believes it. Section 4 answers with a shrug: "It doesn't matter what you think." Trouble arrives regardless, and the poem borrows the cold vocabulary of evolution, "adaptation to stress, / the tiny advantage in your genes," to say so. Against that, the line "I have stopped handing mine along" is startlingly personal. Judging by the text, the speaker is no longer part of that biological chain, and the wry "trouble is no longer my necessity" sounds both relieved and a little wistful. The section ends by reviving the title: "the times don't listen." The plural covers hours, seasons and perhaps the age we live in. Two lines then repeat "still" ("still the auspicious hours arrive, / still they pass") and the repetition gives the poem its steadiest, most clock-like beat.
That word "listen" leads straight into the poem's centre. Section 5 begins by correcting itself: "Listen? Touch it." Time stops being an idea and becomes something handled. It has "texture / like tight wound wool," with "yarn around the fingers, / needle click," so the invented hours of section 1 are now knitted, patterned and made by hand. Then come smell and taste. "Coffee brewed again" holds its repetition inside the word *again*, and "yeast to bread to toast" is time as a chain of transformations. The tastes are "wrinkled apples" (age), "new maple syrup" (freshness) and cherry lollipops "you coveted / way back" (childhood). The shift to "you" pulls the reader in, and the questions soften the lecturing tone of earlier sections.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm follows speech, and its short lines and numbered sections read like separate attempts at one problem. The register keeps changing, from comic to scientific to sensory, which fits a subject that refuses to stay one thing.
The last two sections work like a quiet coda. In section 6 children paint themselves with watercolour "before someone else does it / in color that will remain till the skin wears away." The poem names the festival only as a Hindu "Day of Paint." One reading is that it offers a rehearsal for experience, a chosen, washable mark before life leaves permanent ones. That connects to the earlier talk of stress and adaptation, but the poem leaves the link unspoken. Finally, section 7 answers the "precarious" rim of section 1: "we are never groundless, here." The ground is "the dust of time," the past accumulated and "solid beneath our feet." Dust suggests mortality, yet the poem makes it a foundation.
The poem matters because it takes an abstraction philosophers and physicists argue about and gives it a body. It admits fear of loss without melodrama, and it offers consolation without pretending trouble won't come. Its argument runs through the senses and ends on the ground we are standing on.