Time & Perspective Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks treats time like a match struck in the dark: bright, brief, and already burning down. "Exhaust the little moment" isn’t the gentle self-help version of carpe diem; it’s a command with teeth. The verb exhaust suggests work, almost depletion. A moment isn’t something you sip and savor. It’s something you spend to the bottom because the alternative is letting it evaporate unused.

The sting comes from her refusal to romanticize what that moment contains. "Be it gash or gold" collapses the usual hierarchy of experience. Pain and pleasure are given the same urgent value, not because they’re equivalent, but because they’re equally unrepeatable. Brooks is telling you to face the cut as directly as you chase the gleam. There’s a hard-earned ethic here: don’t postpone your attention until life feels nicer.

The line break and capitalized "Again" feel like a small shout against denial. We keep bargaining with time, imagining we’ll get a cleaner rerun, a better mood, the right conditions. Brooks denies the rerun entirely: "this identical guise" points to how experience disguises itself as ordinary while it’s happening. You only realize it was singular after it’s gone.

Context matters: Brooks wrote out of Black urban life, domestic interiors, and social constraint - worlds where choice is real but narrowed, where moments can be stolen, not scheduled. The intent isn’t to preach optimism; it’s to insist on presence as a form of dignity, even when the present arrives as a wound.