gershon hepner Poems

They’re selling off a bunch of Hebrew books
From Paris, Leiden, Izmir and Bombay.
Bibliophiles all cast their tenterhooks
into this heritage, but few can pay
...

Look with your head for what
you’ve lost, the eyes can’t find
the things that you have not
arranged within your mind.
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In the olden days it was the priest
who was the fount of wisdom, scribes and scholars
replacing him. Though many aren’t deceased,
now precedence is given to the dollar,
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The phoenix that erewhile has from a holocaust
arisen is reborn anew, molecularly
distinguished from its predecessors, having lost
all contact with its past, now living secularly
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Defiled by darkness and by age,
remembering the light of distant youth,
he, in the twilight, will not rage
that he has failed to find the source of truth,
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The most diabolical aspect of Charles
is making the highest of all rationales
survival of fittest, thus claiming that God
believes evolution to be a jihad,
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“In my life death has no place, ”
said Sartre. Bentham, being stuffed,
rests in a glass box where, paleface,
he can’t respond when he’s rebuffed.
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A commentary in poetry some lives,
while others are mere commentaries in prose,
for some an ocean into which one dives,
for others ponds on top of which one rows.
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Nonexistence flows from what is unpronounced,
the dried source of a watershed,
cisternal spaces in the head,
the prey at which no cat has pounced.
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Single combat with shape-shifting
untruths is the constant battle
poets fight while plates are rifting,
quaking while they preach and prattle.
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