gershon hepner Poems

Advances in research depend
on unexpected brilliant breaks
the gods fortuitously send
not triumphs born of our mistakes.
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“Like a windstorm, punishing the oaks,
love shakes my heart.” So Sappho wrote.
Like ridicule in priest and rabbi jokes
which I do not propose to quote,
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To Manutius I say “Bravo! ”
He invented the octavo,
eight pages from a single sheet,
enabling you to be discreet
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Migrating monarchs in Michoacán,
like wandering wildebeests in Serengeti,
more lovely, precious and amazing than
the treasures in museums like the Getty,
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The intellectual who does not ignore us
purports to play the role of a Greek chorus,
although, unlike the chorus, there’s no mask
that covers all the questions he may ask,
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“Movies tend to be far more harmonious, ”
said François Truffaut, “than one's life.”
Whether that's correct or quite erroneous
depends a lot upon one's wife.
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Marriage, often a mistake,
can be a lovely one.
In marriage you can have your cake
and it eat––oh what fun! ––
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Sliding down the banister of life
one hopes the splinters will not face
the wrong way, and, when slipping up, one’s wife
will cover up each splintering disgrace.
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Whatever happened to the “dear, ”
in our “dear so-and-sos”?
Why was this greeting cut off sheer,
like grass that everybody mows
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Tortured by the music, we
recall the early death not of the maiden,
for it is Schubert whom we see
before our eyes. While he was Liederladen,
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