Poem of the Day: ‘Hindsight’

In today’s Poem of the Day, The New York Sun’s associate poetry editor, Sally Thomas, looks at memory. Or rather, she looks at the fictions of art — the falseness, the untrue-to-memory that poetry imposes on the poet. The author of the 2020 collection “Motherland” and the recent novel, “Works of Mercy” — and editor, with the critic Micah Mattix, of the new anthology, “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940” — Ms. Thomas is a poet in North Carolina with a deep appreciation of formal verse.

In “Hindsight,” a set of pentameter quatrains, she follows her memory from the things she is sure remembers to things about which she is less sure. And how, she asks, shall she fill in the memory with the writer’s touch — a necessary falsity taking the place of the forgotten details and the half-remembered settings? And so with the overall feeling: How shall we remember as a golden time what at the time may not have seemed so?