gershon hepner Poems

As gifts to Solomon the Sheban Queen
brought lavish presents, Cushite gold
and precious stones and incense, clearly keen
to prove that she would not withhold
...

Where yesterdays began
tomorrows will resume,
after the todays that ran
without much elbow room
...

Beauty should be cause of doubt,
remaining as a paradox
within a fog that, with lights-out,
become its combination locks
...

Bonnard paints her enigmatic,
ageless in her bath, his lovely wife.
to stimulate more sexual static
in my well-aged but loving life
...

Once Leda announced to her husband whose old,
“I need to be laid, since I’m feeling so cold.”
At the same time she said, while removing a garter,
“I’m so moralistic, I’ll die like a martyr.”
...

Nobody has ever managed to annex
a single letter in the way that Kafka did.
As Joseph K. (“The Trial”) and K. (“The Castle”) , specs
provided by his name conceals that he’s a Yid,
...

When women are twenty
they get sex in plenty.
Once they are thirty
they like it more dirty
...

Did an asp kill Cleopatra,
commiting suicide like a shahid,
or was her death caused by a fatwa
Octavian ordered, killing her indeed,
...

Relativism is a name for serious thought,
Professor Stanley Fish declares,
for one man’s don’t is often someone else’s ought,
and one man’s fears another’s dares.
...

Consider ants, so Solomon advised,
not realizing that it lives in super-
organisms, some so specialized
that they shift dirt and dung without a scooper,
...