Life's Minutiae Poem by gershon hepner

Is eternity a time that we
muck over all minutiae of life,
or could it be an opportunity
to cut through all of them, eternal knife
that’s sharp enough to show us life’s cross-sections,
the layers that compose it like a cake
which we enjoyed, with time’s most sweet confections,
quite unaware of moments that we bake,
not in an oven but when we connect,
in moments where minutiae matter most,
with those we love, and poets may dissect,
before eternity’s cool permafrost,
each fact of life a moment to remember
before eternity becomes December?

Inspired by an article on Philip Roth and his latest novel, “Indignation, ” by James Marcus (“The Lion in Winter, ” LA Times, September 14,2008) :

And so it goes: the author in his New England fastness, indulging in an occasional game of baseball on television but mostly sorting through the facts. It sounds like a dutiful existence. It sounds, too, like Roth’s description of the afterlife in “Indignation”: “Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would forever have to remember each moment of life, down to its minute components” Being dead, I suggest to Roth, seems indistinguishable from being a writer. He laughs and draws a vital distinction: “Well, we’re the living dead.”

9/14/08