Translations Made By God Poem by gershon hepner

Our lives are all translations made by God,
by age, injustice, sickness and by war,
of lives whose pagination may be odd,
but may match even numbers like fourscore.
Eventually the pages will lie scattered
upon a grave that, like a library floor,
will have a stone on which we will be flattered,
but nearly every reader will ignore.

Inspired by lines by John Donne which I ead in Jonathan Rosen’s book, The Talmud and the Internet:

All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is torn out of the book and translated into a better language. And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to another.

8/26/08