Poem
Penelope Shuttle
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
I was running out of timeor time was running out of me
I was no longer
decades of clear water
Time
was a cache of lions,
the end of all the birds
I was hurrying to catch up with Time,
while Time stayed home
doing the ironing,
folding his minutes,
smoothing his hours,
soon there’d be not a crumpled second
for me to hide in
© 2006, Penelope Shuttle
From: uncollected
Publisher: David Higham Associates,
From: uncollected
Publisher: David Higham Associates,
Penelope Shuttle
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1947)
“In my poetry I give primacy to the breath. For me it is the way the poem breathes that gives it form.”
Penelope Shuttle lives in Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall not far from Land’s End, the toe of England. She was married to the poet Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, and has a grown-up daughter, Zoe.
Penelope Shuttle lives in Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall not far from Land’s End, the toe of England. She was married to the poet Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003, and has a grown-up daughter, Zoe.
Poems
Poems of Penelope Shuttle
Close
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
I was running out of timeor time was running out of me
I was no longer
decades of clear water
Time
was a cache of lions,
the end of all the birds
I was hurrying to catch up with Time,
while Time stayed home
doing the ironing,
folding his minutes,
smoothing his hours,
soon there’d be not a crumpled second
for me to hide in
From: uncollected
RUNNING OUT OF TIME
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