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gershon hepner (5 3 38 / leipzig)
What Lies Before and Within Us
What lies behind us and before us
is tiny compared to what's within,
but though the first two never bore us,
being past or speculative, let's begin
each day by looking deep inside
ourselves, as if the die were not already cast,
for within ourselves we must abide
forever, from our first gasp to the last,
and what's before us or behind
cannot affect us as our own potential can,
if we explore it till we find
the engine drivig every woman, every man.
Deep inside all people there lie hidden motors
responding to decisions made by them as voters.
Each vote we choose to cast as voters can belie
our fate, determined by the casting of a die.
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Poet's Notes about The Poem
After writing this poem I read in Pico Iyer's review of Douglas Coupland's Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work ('The McLuhan Galaxy, ' NYR,5/26/11) :
Coupland's prose here is willfully slangy and almost without weight; McLuhan is seen as 'a fuddy-duddy in a glen plaid jacket' and 'an information leaf blower.' The global village could project us into 'a single 24-7 blobby, fuzzy, quasi-sentient metacommunity.' Life 'becomes that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash.'
5/18/11 #12290