Before There Were Clocks

In the days before clocks did time move slow or did it move fast.
What happened to the things before time were they consigned to the past.
I know there was day and I know there was night.
Was there still twenty fours hours of time or just a trick of the light.

Before there were clocks how did people get by.
Not ever knowing their birthday or if it was their time to die.
Did people wake early or go late to bed.
Before there was clocks it must have messed with their heads.

Days they were governed by the sun rising, and the man in the moon.
From the cradle to the grave did the reaper visit too soon.
Did he harvest in summer or just wait for the fall.
How did the seasons revolve if there was no time for it all.

Time first really began with a stick in the ground.
Someone noticed that the sun cast a shadow and the shadow moved round.
Somebody else drew a circle and added ten segments and after a while.
This stick in the ground became the world's first working sundial.

It was somewhere in Egypt that time was invented and now time moved fast.
Around eight centuries laters time started to slip through the first hourglass.
This was the time of enlightenment and great men started to learn.
New concepts were born daily as the hourglass turned.

But then just like now it was the richest of men who had time on their hands.
Time slipped through the fingers of the poor merely like grains of sand.
Hours had been invented in time and it was the poor who would pay.
Doing back breaking work as long as there were hours in the day.

Was everyone early to work or were they always turning up late.
Before clocks were invented, if you make an appointment how long would you wait.
So now we had daytime and hours but how long was in it.
Some genius paused for a second and said let's take our time for a minute.

All of a sudden time had been divided it was a matter of fact.
Time pieces started evolving in time and they were getting exact.
Weird contraptions of intricate designs with little ratchets small cogs and gears.
These all moved slowly through time for the next thousand years.

But it seemed almost overnight that the pendulum rocked.
When about three hundred years ago some cuckoo guy invented the clock.
Big grandfather clocks stood so tall in great hallways looking so fine.
As the world now had a timescale called Greenwich Mean Time.

Time seemed to speed up as everyone had time machines inside their homes.
The world seemed to get smaller and was split into time zones.
Life seemed to move faster at an ever quickening pace.
As people all started clock watching the hours pass by on that big old clock face.

The world kept getting smaller and so did the clock.
Two hundred years or so ago appeared the first pocket watch.
From that first stick in the ground to the falling hourglass sand.
Man now could hold time in the palm of his hand.

But time waits for no man and you cannot hold time.
Time marches on in some indefinable line.
The clock now is ticking for us all and time it moves on.
Will time still exist when we are all gone.