Nobody likes being called old, yet almost everyone is happy to talk about an old friend. That contradiction is where this untitled poem begins. Its title slot holds only three asterisks, so the poem starts like a thought already in progress. The speaker points out that we resist "old" when it is aimed at us but "rejoice" when it is aimed at "friendship, love, relations." The verb is a bold choice. It isn't "accept" or "admit" but a word of celebration. In those phrases, old means tested, trusted and familiar, nothing like an insult. From there the poem moves to its central idea: age is far less solid than the numbers suggest, and what we actually live in are moments.
The first stanza sets the tone. "May be" is written as two words, and the split makes us hear it as "it may be," a slower and more considered hesitation than a casual "maybe." The next line, "But have you wonder -", is short and cut off by a dash, like a speaker leaning toward a listener. The English is slightly off-kilter here and elsewhere ("have you wonder," "older that we thought," "betweens"). Whatever the cause, the effect is of someone thinking aloud rather than polishing an aphorism. The third line stretches out again, and its list of "friendship, love, relations" has no "and," as if the items were being remembered one after another.
The second stanza is the poem's most carefully balanced. "Older that we thought" is answered by "younger than we thought," and the repeated "we thought" puts the weight on the verb. Age here is a belief and an estimate, something we guess at. The poem never says which guess is right. It refuses to settle, and that refusal is the point. The pronoun matters too. It is always "we," never "I," so the speaker shares the doubt rather than lecturing from outside it. The word "old" has also quietly changed. In the first stanza it was a label to dodge, and by the second it is a position on a sliding scale, with "older" and "younger" as its two ends.
The third stanza contains the poem's cleverest move: "betweens the may be...s." The speaker turns "may be" into a plural noun and then adds a plural "betweens," so uncertainty becomes a place with territory around and between its markers. The ellipsis is wedged inside the word itself, stretching it out as though the maybes go on and on. Then comes the answer: "We don't have ages... / We only have moments." "Ages" can mean the numbers we attach to ourselves, but it also means long stretches of time, as in "it's been ages." Either way, "moments" is its opposite: small, present and impossible to count in years. The second ellipsis holds a breath before the line lands. After a poem full of hedges, the last line is the first flat statement, with its plain, mostly one-syllable words and its firm "only."
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse in a 3-2-3 shape, with long lines opening and closing the stanzas around a short, hesitant middle. The repetition of "old," "may be," "thought" and "we" does the work that rhyme might do elsewhere. There is also almost no visual imagery. The poem's pictures are spatial and abstract: the "between" and the contrast of ages with moments. That is a good lesson for students, because it shows a poem can be vivid without describing a single object.
The poem's significance lies in its quiet reframing of something people often fear. It doesn't deny that time passes or argue with anyone. It relocates the question, suggesting that if our sense of our own age is only a guess, then the reliable thing is what is happening now. The hesitant grammar and the pauses also suit the subject. A poem about not being sure ends up sounding honestly unsure, and in the end it is still sure of one thing.