Price Above All Rubies Poem by gershon hepner

Women on the edge of being just
a little overweight are more enticing
than those with narrow hips and flattened lust,
on runways far more like the sugared icing
on wedding cakes than dough of Shabbos loaves,
the challahs eaten after kiddush wine;
within their saftig flesh are treasure troves
which are for every man the bottom line
that he is seeking when he’s making love.
I know a gal like this, discovered long
ago by me. Her price is well above
all rubies, as I tell her in a song
I sing to her before she shares my glass
of wine, and challahs on the Shabbos table.
I love her for her face and breasts and arse,
but also for the way she’s always able
to take from me all that I give, returning
my gifts to her with compound interest. That,
more than her beauty, means that I am earning
far more from her than from a runway brat.

Mickey, in Philip Roth in Philip Roth’s “Sabbath Theater, ” describes Drenka, a dark, Italian-looking Croat from the Dalmatian coast, as “a full, firmly made woman at the provocative edge of being just overweight, her shape, at her heaviest, reminiscent of those clay figurines molded circa 2000 B.C, fat little dolls with big breasts and big thighs unearthed all the way from Europe down to Asia Minor and worshipped under a dozen different names as the great mother of the gods”.

11/10/09