Forever and Today

A promise for eternity stirs distrust in Forever and Today: whoever says “forever” easily overlooks the moment. The short poem without a dedication appears in the second section of The Rose That Grew from Concrete, “Nothing Can Come Between Us”, and revolves around a single question: What about today?

Certainty Before Eternity

The premise is tangible: the woman addressed promises to love the speaker forever. He presses further, asking whether this affection will hold as dusks turn to dawns and the years go by. If so, they should rejoice and enjoy their happiness. If not, he asks her to spare his heart today-so he can recover before eternity even begins.

The ending asks for forbearance. If his doubts and questions hurt her, she should forgive his fragile heart; he only wanted to know whether her love would hold before the day began.

Drawn Questions

The original manuscript reveals a formal peculiarity: Tupac used question marks in place of the word “questions”. In the reproduced handwriting, the book documents how he regularly replaced entire words with such pictograms.

The image of a vulnerable heart protecting itself in advance runs through the entire volume of poetry. Most clearly in The Fear in the Heart of a Man, which Tupac dedicated directly “to his heart”: there, the speaker fears no attacker, but certainly a broken heart. Forever and Today explores this fear on a small scale-not as a dramatic confession, but as a tentative question.

According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poem, like the other texts, was written between 1989 and 1991; a more precise date is not documented. Anyone wishing to explore Tupac’s literary beginnings further will find an overview of the entire book and all the poems in the introduction.