gershon hepner Poems

I’m up in the attic
and above, in my mind
the stench and the static
I leave far behind
...

We need to draw a moral line,
and give up looking for another
hopefully more caring mother
and father, as did Coraline.
...

Down my ladder to my moon,
landing on my lunar berth,
I’ll descend to meet you soon,
in the sunlight, down on earth.
...

Of depression now I sing:
hear the bad news that I bring,
falling arms of that great man
who says: “I hope, and therefore can! ”
...

When I see the milkman coming,
I don’t experience an intending.
That logically is the upsumming
up messages that I’d be sending,
...

Crusades, blood libels, inquisitions and conversions that were forced,
indifference to the blood of helpless Jews spilt in the holocaust,
a litany of crimes for which the Pope should use his bully pulpit,
and yet equivocates while in denial, hardly mea culpa’d,
...

The permanence of things and the impermanence
of people neither is surprising nor a paradox;
every planet has a star and firmaments,
and thinks that it finds balance in the equinox,
...

Don’t go to New Jersey,
to visit your daughter;
don’t ask me for mercy
if you drink the water.
...

Alfred Knopf rejected Puzo’s Godfather.
which for a major publisher was odd, rather;
still, if he had been cannier and savvier
he might have had some serious problems with the Mafia.
...

That is the land of lost content,
I see it through a scrim
of memory that time has bent,
both indistinct and dim.
...