I Have A Place To Live A Life Poem by gershon hepner

I have a place to live a life,
suburban, very homely, house,
sharing with a loving wife
two computers and their mouse.

The verses that she writes with wit
she sends me every day, and sings
about her love, as we both flit
and flare when our computer pings.

I share my verses, too, with her,
and even when they do not scan
it seems that many make her purr
with feline frissons for her man.

She’s not my mother, yet I milk her
for every penny that she’s worth;
together we both soar like Rilke,
and live in love, though down to earth.


Moira G. Weigel, “Reintroducing Rilke, ” WSJ October 10, writes about Rilke:
Next week, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing what it hopes will become the definitive English-language edition of Rilke's poetry. Selected and translated by Edward Snow with a preface by acclaimed Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, 'The Poetry of Rilke' surveys the five volumes generally agreed to embody Rilke's mature style including 'The Book of Hours' (1905) , two sets of 'New Poems' (1907,1908) and the two volumes widely considered the pinnacle of his achievement, 'The Duino Elegies' and 'Sonnets to Rilke's brief lyric, 'The Poet, ' concisely evokes his biography: 'I have no loved one, no house / no place to lead a life.' Born in 1875 in Prague, then the limit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rilke left the city of his unhappy childhood in his twenties, for decades of peregrination. First, he traveled with his lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, (also an intimate of Friedrich Nietzsche and a friend of Sigmund Freud) , to Berlin, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. After a fleeting marriage to another artist, Rilke fled to Paris and worked as a secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin. Displaced by World War I, which caught him in Germany, Rilke later sojourned in Italy and Egypt before settling in Switzerland, where he died of leukemia in 1926.


10/12/09