Good times and bad times arrive in exactly the same grammar. "A time comes of sunny skies and yellow flowers," shinigami__kun begins, and the next line copies the sentence almost word for word, changing only the weather: "dark skies and dead flowers." The whole argument is hidden in that copying. Neither time gets a grander verb or more space on the page. Both simply "come." Everything after follows from this: if every time arrives and leaves, nobody can live inside one forever, so the speaker turns to someone, a "you," and asks why they have stopped.
The poem never says who this "you" is or what they have stopped doing. That silence is its most interesting feature. Because the opening is so evenly balanced, the question fits two very different people. One is stuck in the "dead flowers" time, unable to move past loss. The other is clinging to the "sunny skies," afraid to let a happy time end. The text supports both readings equally, and the poem doesn't choose between them. Its tone is just as hard to pin down. "Why have you stopped?" could be a gentle nudge from a friend or an impatient scolding, and the plain, unadorned wording lets us hear either.
The word choices carry more than they first seem to. In "A time comes and leaves," the verb "leaves" also happens to be what grows on the plants of the opening couplet. That may be coincidence, but the poem's flowers and skies make the pun feel natural: time departs the way foliage falls. "Yellow" is another quiet double. Set against "sunny," it is a bright, cheerful colour, but it is also the colour of things beginning to fade, and the parallel with "dead" nudges us to wonder whether the good time already carries its own ending. That second reading is an inference, but the poem's structure invites it. The phrasing "A time comes" may also recall the famous "a time to…" passage of Ecclesiastes, with one important change. There, people act within times; here, times simply happen to us. The title, too, drops the "a" and offers just "time," the abstract force behind all these separate arrivals.
The form does a good deal of this work without announcing it. There is no end rhyme and no steady metre. The opening lines are long, rolling things of about a dozen syllables, and then the poem contracts: "A time comes and leaves," "A time does not stay," and finally the four syllables of "When it doesn't." Repetition stands in for rhyme. "Flowers" closes both opening lines, "A time" begins three more, and "stay" returns in the fourth couplet. The four tidy couplets have the neatness of a proverb, which makes the emotional pressure in the last two feel sharper by contrast. The connective "So" at the start of both questions turns the poem into a little piece of reasoning: here are the facts, therefore explain yourself.
The ending is where the construction pays off. The first question, "So why have you stopped?", is followed by a line that is not a sentence at all: "When it doesn't stay." The reason arrives separately, like a thought the speaker can't help adding. Then "stopped" becomes "paused," a softer word that suggests the stillness might be temporary, as if the speaker were offering a way back. "Tell me" makes the voice more personal, almost pleading. And the final line, "When it doesn't," leaves out the very word it depends on. "Stay" has dropped away, and the poem, appropriately, will not stay either.
That is what makes it more than a neat saying about time passing. A poem urging us not to pause ends on a gap that forces the reader to pause and supply the missing word. It also withholds any answer to its own question, so we have to give one. In a few dozen words it avoids easy comfort ("this too shall pass") and easy blame, and leaves the reader holding a question they cannot dodge: if nothing stays, what exactly are you waiting for?