Striking from the Calendar
Unborn Tomorrow and dead Yesterday.

The lines compress a familiar carpe-diem meditation: “Tomorrow” is not yet real (“unborn”), and “Yesterday” is irretrievably past (“dead”), so both are, in effect, struck from the ledger of what can be acted upon. The image of a calendar suggests the human habit of living by dates—planning, regretting, postponing—while the speaker urges attention to the only time that can be inhabited and altered: the present moment. The phrasing also carries a quiet fatalism: time’s flow makes both anticipation and nostalgia psychologically powerful but practically empty. Read this way, the couplet is a corrective to anxiety and remorse, redirecting value toward immediate experience and choice.