Die The Mind Has Cast Poem by gershon hepner

For the writer, as for God,
the process of creation can’t
be drawn precisely, far too odd
to make clear to a confidant,
a mystery that’s sometimes given,
but far more often is withheld,
refracted through a heart that’s riven,
shocked and by emotions shelled.

It starts with warfare in the mind
between its efforts to maintain
its silence when it cannot find
the words required to explain
its observations, and its counter-
inclination to expound
on its chaotic, dark encounter,
on creation’s battleground.

Mind fights with verbal ammunition,
but can’t conceal its lethal lack
of concepts needed for cognition,
without which it cannot attack
with papers, poems, books and plays
ideas, and call itselfs creator,
no less than God, and think its ways
more plausible, and therefore greater,
than those attributed to Him
by priests and prophets of the past:
though cognitively it is dim,
this is the die the mind has cast.

Tobias Wolff, in a recorded interview on KUSC this morning, discussed what he called the mystery of creation, sometimes give, sometimes withheld.


3/2/09