gershon hepner Poems

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,
...

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,
...

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.
...

Don’t go to New Jersey,
to visit your daughter;
don’t ask me for mercy
if you drink the water.
...

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! ”
...

When they sang the song of hope
in Bergen Belsen, bodies which
had not yet been transformed to soap
or shoveled off into a ditch
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Put the instrument on pause,
fade away with no repeat
before death comes, the final cause
of retirement. We cheat
...

“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,
...

Two anniversaries on January twentyseven
coincide.The birth of Mozart is the first,
the Auschwitz liberation second, meaning heaven
can lead the way to hell and not prevent the worst.
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The people whom I always meet
at weddings and at mitzvah bars
are those with whom it’s not a treat
to be with. I don’t ask for stars
...