Future Memories Poem by gershon hepner

Future memories that we create
when celebrating what is here and now
are often lost till we investigate
how they came to be stored, and we allow
the past we’d buried and had disinvited
to be unpacked from mental boxes where
it gathers attic dust while feeling slighted
by the forgetfulness we can’t foreswear.

We wonder when we open any box
containing all the memories we’d packed
why we had ever sealed them off with locks,
and change them into fiction, . Any fact
is hard enough to face when it’s the present,
and harder still to face when it involves
the past, a marathon that, hardly pleasant,
is only tolerable when it dissolves.


Inspired by J. J. Sempé’s cover for the August 11 & 18 New Yorker, entitled “Future Memories, ” and the comment that Bjanka from Croatia made regarding my poem, “After Childhood, ” in which the second quatrain is:

When we’re being reminiscent,
trying to recall that land,
we must go where Alice isn’t,
wandering in wonderland.

Bjanka’s comment was: “You’rer one of the the books that’s been written and waiting for me to read.”


8/6/08