Mary F. C. Pratt's "Times" circles around one idea: time is both slippery and solid. The opening joke about asking for an extra hour treats clocks as make-believe, and even sunrise seems precarious. Yet the speaker prefers the ordinary, the "easy similarity of days," to anything as dramatic as a falling comet. Section 3 admits a small superstition: feeling thankful for calm seems to invite trouble. Section 4 answers that trouble comes regardless, and the speaker has stopped passing on her genes, while the hours keep arriving and passing anyway.
The poem then turns physical. Time has the texture of knitted wool, the smell of coffee and toast, the taste of apples, syrup and childhood lollipops. The mood is gentle, wry and quietly grateful. The short section on a Hindu festival of paint suggests that we are marked by experience early. The ending is steadying: we stand on "the dust of time," so we are never groundless.