gershon hepner Poems

Of depression now I sing:
hear the bad news that I bring,
falling arms of that great man
who says: “I hope, and therefore can! ”
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When I see the milkman coming,
I don’t experience an intending.
That logically is the upsumming
up messages that I’d be sending,
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That is the land of lost content,
I see it through a scrim
of memory that time has bent,
both indistinct and dim.
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Light verse can lighten with precision,
diminishing the gravity of laws
that weigh us down with indecision
by snatching humor from depression’s claws.
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Home is where they have to let you in
when you go back, said Robert Frost;
it’s the inclusion where you must begin,
but only end up if and when you’re lost.
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The permanence of things and the impermanence
of people neither is surprising nor a paradox;
every planet has a star and firmaments,
and thinks that it finds balance in the equinox,
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Alfred Knopf rejected Puzo’s Godfather.
which for a major publisher was odd, rather;
still, if he had been cannier and savvier
he might have had some serious problems with the Mafia.
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Crusades, blood libels, inquisitions and conversions that were forced,
indifference to the blood of helpless Jews spilt in the holocaust,
a litany of crimes for which the Pope should use his bully pulpit,
and yet equivocates while in denial, hardly mea culpa’d,
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Don’t go to New Jersey,
to visit your daughter;
don’t ask me for mercy
if you drink the water.
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“She’s ruined mah play! ” cried Tennessee,
from the balcony at Geraldine,
who’d taken it from him, to be
her own. That’s why the playwright made a scene,
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