What Are You When Not Allowed To Do What You Can Do? Poem by gershon hepner

WHAT ARE YOU WHEN YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO WHAT YOU CAN DO?


If you are what you do,
what are you when you're not
allowed to do what you
can do? That is just what
I ask, and I reply:
"This must be very tragic
for people who rely
on what they're doing. Magic
can't bring a person back
if circumstances rid
him of his only knack,
and he was what he did.

I try to be not what
I do, but what I am,
and being me is not,
I hope, a hollow sham
defensively defined
by what I do, but rather
an essence that's refined
from husband, poet, father."
This may be wishful thinking,
but this way I become
immune from shameful shrinking
when asked to do what's dumb.

Stephen Holden ("Perils of the Corporate Ladder: It Hurts When You Fall, " NYT,12/10/10) reviews "The Company Men, " directed by John Wells, with Tommy Lee Jones and Ben Affleck:

The movie powerfully revisits a theme touched on last year in the bitter comic drama "Up In The Air": the devastating impact of sudden downsizing of corporate executives who have lived by the treacherous adage of "You are what you do"…."The Company of Men" looks at them straight in the eye from the trenches…[T]he movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it? "

5/8/12 #10135