“…Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything…”
From “My Epitaph, Written in Sprigs of Dill” Gunther Grass
Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything
The food I eat, though it’s too much
And I don’t want to see my guilt
For taking my small comfort there
Sitting down at my computer
Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything
Thoughts in emails to far-flung friends
Work will intrude briefly, perhaps
Poetry, words of protest hot
Letters within my novel too
Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything
Living my life there on the page
Days of action now mostly past
Memories wrestling with new thoughts
Both are rich seams for me to mine
Tomorrow, I’ll write down everything…
© Andrew Wilson, 2025
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft invites us to celebrate the birth day of Günter Grass who, as well as being a ‘politically engaged’ German novelist, was also a poet…
There is always that day tomorrow… I wonder what comes inbetween ambition and success? I am trying this right now, and hope to be able to find new ways to work.
Hmm? In between ambition and success? I think there comes a point in life when one realises that one is not going to be famous or materially successful, but I think of lives as like ripples spreading out from a stone dropped in a pool and interacting with other lives sometimes reinforcing and sometimes subtracting from. Some people like Florence Nightingale say, have fame that will last as long as hospitals take the form she influenced but others, like say, a village baker, might be unrecognised even in their own time, for all that they do – an extra bun to a single parent, a job offer to a man just out of prison, a loan to a friend at a critical time. But even if all these actions are unseen by the majority of the village, they may, in their cumulative effect, change the whole trajectory of life for that village – so I don’t worry about ambition and success as much as trying to live right by my fellow human beings. How to translate this into working practice in your life, is, as you say, the big question…
Very well done, Andrew! Tomorrow’s another day and if not, it won’t really matter!
Thank you, Dwight, yes, but things can slip too far…
Andrew, your quatern gives voice to what so many experience ~ well, me for one! [are you writing a novel?] Cheers ~ the weekend is here!!! Lots going on in my small city.
Thanks Helen – I finished an SF novel but the first more literary novel is still a work in progress and I am covering a decade or more of the two main characters by an exchannge of letters between them…
My favorite exchange of letters exchanged in novels is contained in the trilogy series “Griffin and Sabine” by Nick Bantock. Each story is told through a series of actual letters, some of them stuffed in actual envelopes, and postcards too! The art, their story is phenomenal.
Tbhat sounds amazing if likely an expensive piece of work, Helen…
A splurge years ago.
I ordered a (secondhand) copy from World of Books and it arrived yesterday – good as new and it is indeed utterly charmimg, Helen, so thanks for the tip… 💜
Nicely done, Andrew. The line you chose as a refrain is so apt for writers.
Thanks Kim, it certainly jumped out at me…
a great refrain choice from Grass but I though too that yours would also would make a good one
“Living my life there on the page”
p.s. you mentioned the novel based on letters – the epistolary format I really enjoy as in Les Liaisons dangereuses
Thanks Laura, yes – that is how it feels sometimes – “Living my life there on the page”…
Great write and it has inspired me to take the Grass phrase for another prompt. Thanks! 👏 🙏
I am certainly going to look for more of his poetry now…
I love your refrain. It is tailor-made for writers!
Thanks Sara – I agree…
That “tomorrow” of procrastination is alluringly blinding to today which disappears in … what? … 24 hours?! Let’s get moving!!! 🙂
Ah yes – procrastination is the elephant in that poem, Dora…