a senryu inspired by my PictureThis plant identifier app:

My backyard mushroom

is possibly poisonous

—good luck with long life
a senryu inspired by my PictureThis plant identifier app:
My backyard mushroom
is possibly poisonous
—good luck with long life
Forgotten Sounds Pt.II. Marco Nurnberger. CC BY
Memory makes us. If we couldn’t recall the who, what, where, and when of our everyday lives, we wouldn’t be able to function. – “Memory Basics,” Psychology Today
This week, I remembered a poem I wrote as a teenager.
Some of the lines returned to me, complete and clear.
I couldn’t recall other lines at all.
I wrote the poem after a dream. In this dream, I was with a group of young people around my own age in a deserted beachy area with trees. We had reunited there on a hazy afternoon when the light is most golden, just as the sun begins to set, and with great joy, we began singing.
Except that I really did not know these people, this place, this song. In the dream I knew I was supposed to know all of these things, and I didn’t. I was meant to belong, to be a part, and I couldn’t. The sense of mounting sadness over the desperate attempt to remember the significance of these people and the words to the beautiful song so that I could join in was overwhelming.
The dream haunted me so that when I woke, I wrote the poem.
Remembering my poem for the first time in years, I wanted to reread it, to recapture the lines that were missing in my memory. I could envision the little stapled booklet I made, could actually recall other poems I wrote in it, word for word.
I couldn’t find it.
I searched everywhere I thought the booklet ought to be – I could not remember where I put it.
Things like this become compulsions for me. The more I searched without success, the more determined I became to find the missing poems.
At some point I realized the many layers of irony folded into this situation: I wrote a poem about forgetting something I could not remember in the first place, because I wanted to remember the experience; not remembering all the lines compelled me to read it again, and I forgot where I put it.
I began to think about what dementia patients must feel like.
But I kept looking, and yesterday, in a box of old notebooks, in a planner under some loose papers, I found it:
Forgotten Remembrance
My mind, it plays a melody
That it hasn’t ever heard
A voice sings in my memory
But remembers not a word
Faces I don’t recognize
Are singing this with me
Sadness streaming from my eyes
Such a haunting harmony
I hear the music chiming there
And then again it’s gone
Hidden in my mind somewhere
Chiming off and on
I ought to know this tune
These words I’ve sung before
I’ll try to learn them very soon
So I can sing them more
I can’t remember this refrain
I’ve forgotten it this far
My mind cries out to know this strain
And what the lyrics are
But all I know is sorrow
A deep and dark despair
I’ll cry and cry tomorrow
For what was never there.
At last. My mind can rest now.
I certainly can’t end on such a dark note, so today I pay tribute to the vital, mysterious power of memory, how it makes us who we are; to writing, which preserves who we are at various points in our lives and sets us free from whatever haunts or hurts us; and to the foresight of my young, rather gothic self for having grasped it.