By Valentina DuPont
Introduction
I wrote this poem after rereading Metropolitan Nightmare by Stephen Vincent Benét, a piece that whispers a warning about how cities forget themselves. His imagery and slow-burning tension made me think deeply about San Francisco, the city I arrived in at eighteen, full of hope and softness, now carrying a different weight.
Over the years, I’ve watched it shift, quietly, steadily, painfully. Some cities fall loudly. Others dim like a fading light. And the danger lies in how quickly the human eye adapts, how easily compassion erodes into routine.
This poem is my attempt to see beyond that forgetting.
City of Fog and Forgetting
It always begins softly—
a shift no larger than a breath,
a thinning at the edges of memory
where a city starts to unmake itself.
Once, the fog moved gently here,
a tame creature padding through the streets,
its cool paws brushing doorways
as if blessing them.
The hills caught the light
with the innocence of early promise.
But promises rot as quietly as fruit.
A bruise first—small, unnoticed—
then spreading its dark through the flesh
until the sweetness forgets itself.
So it was with this place.
The skyline sharpened its edges.
Sidewalks cracked beneath hurried feet.
Doorways filled with sleep
that had no bed to belong to.
Bodies folded into themselves
like birds that no longer believed in wings.
Still the city moved forward,
practicing the commerce of distraction—
headphones, headlines, hurried mornings.
Cardboard turned to shelter.
Hands shook in the cold.
Puppies blinked from market boxes
like weak flames fighting wind.
On certain nights, beneath a thin sheet of plastic,
a human form curled under torn cardboard,
trying to disappear into concrete—
a shape noticed only by the streetlight.
Couples passed laughing,
their voices rising warm and blind,
as if the ground beneath them
were clean.
So it happens:
not with violence,
but with forgetting.
Some cities fall with a roar.
Others with a long inward sigh.
This one is choosing the latter.
Danger does not arrive with thunder.
It arrives with repetition—
with the slow training of the eye
to see suffering as scenery,
with the soft erosion of surprise
until the extraordinary
looks ordinary.
A city unravels like this:
inch by inch,
pulse by pulse,
the living turning ghostly
while the ghosts are mistaken for stone.
And someday, someone will say,
“What harm can a little forgetting do?”
while stepping over a human shadow
pressed into the pavement.
Not knowing that forgetting
is how a city foretells
its own end.
© 2025 Valentina DuPont — All Rights Reserved
Poems From The Kitchen Table 
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