I wrote this in response to a request from Mistress Rosamund of Mercia while serving as Poet Laureate of Meridies in 1996-97. It was part of a longer poem that described efforts to tell the future, which was somehow relevant to court proceedings. But I've lost the rest and really this set of lines appearing at the beginning and end was the good bit.
Time runs, steady as drums
Sprightly as squirrels* over the duns
And slow as slugs.
It eddies and whirls
About the legs and under the rugs.
Time carries, and comes
Time buries, and bleeds
Counted by suns and the rings on trees
And we, peering through its mask
Are so bold as to ask
What the future might hold.
*I wrote this before the internet became the question-answering genie it is now, and before I knew that squirrels did not, in fact, come to Britain until the 1890s (according to Wikipedia anyway, for what that's worth). Now I know better, but it's still the best word to fit there, even though it betrays my ignorance of period-available fauna.