We consider stratified negation in temporal logic programming. We demonstrate that the cycle-sum test (which was initially proposed for detecting deadlocks in the context of temporal functional programming) can also be used as a syntactic stratification test for temporal logic programming. Therefore, on the one hand we exhibit a class of temporal logic programs with negation which have a well-defined semantics, and on the other hand we provide further evidence that the cycle-sum test is a fundamental one in the area of temporal programming.