Times of Day

Dawn knocking woke up Troilus,

Time bundled up his Cressida,

the leaving was not easy,

yet to Time he had to leave her.

No twin trumpets sounded

a cleaving silver blow

as soldiers laced their boots up.

at Thomas’s Cockcrow.

Said Ulysses to Achilles:

fame is trodden down

by tramping ranks that follow

the martial tread of Time.

In the Great War, Stoppard’s soldier,

asked Joyce, what did you do?

I wrote Ulysses, he said.

What did you?

Bottom woke remember

to a vision quite untellable,

but in memory Titania,

kept an image detestable.

Helena at dawn and Hermia

found a lover’s true duality:

yet at evening mocked the love

of Pyramus and Thisbe.

Rosalind in daylight

sought a fool to make her merry

not the fictive melancholy

of Jacques’ chronology.

In twilight Pozzo lost his watch -

Was his well at level zero?

On a rope’s end exits Lucky.

Is Time un pozzo nero?

When one has fun, says Didi.

How time goes fast .

Gogo, feeling low remarks:

At any rate it passed.

Hamlet cracks a joke,

The jaw of Yorick drops.

What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?

So Troilus said to Hector,

When the knocking stops?

©Terry Hodgson2020