Hiding Behind Clouds Poem by gershon hepner

When the sun hides behind clouds
you should not waste time by grieving;
leave this to the madding crowds
who are stuck on disbelieving.
Outside Paradise most pricks
of thorns of roses tend to heal,
and believers find a fix
if they let the blood congeal.

Carol Muske-Dukes reviews poetry published in 2004 in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 5,2004:

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was a true poet of the 20th century, and his poems reflect that history: work in the Resistance movement in Poland in World War II, life under Communism, years in America. The poems in 'Second Space' (Ecco: 112 pp., $23.95) , translated by the author with the distinguished poet Robert Hass, are new, written before his death this year at 93. His powerful spirit of inquiry remains undimmed here, though his dream-like lyrical interrogation of mortality is either despairing or lighted with a brave hope. It is interesting to think that Milosz had a sensibility much like Justice's — but the events of his life forever altered his voice, gave it lyric and manifesto timbre, and ultimately confirmed a poet's allegiance to an eternal aesthetic climate:

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise….

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.

Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.

12/7/04