gershon hepner Poems

Reading letters written by
her sister, Nazneen learns that life
can be romantic, and will try
to play the role of cheating wife,
...

If omissions are not accidents,
what’s included may not be
deliberate, and often makes less sense
than silence, best of derniers cris.
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Not forgotten or past over, though
the numbers simply can’t be comprehended,
which is the reason why we tend to know
far more about the way that Anne’s life ended
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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,
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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,
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Don’t go to New Jersey,
to visit your daughter;
don’t ask me for mercy
if you drink the water.
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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.
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That is the land of lost content,
I see it through a scrim
of memory that time has bent,
both indistinct and dim.
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Light verse can lighten with precision,
diminishing the gravity of laws
that weigh us down with indecision
by snatching humor from depression’s claws.
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Home is where they have to let you in
when you go back, said Robert Frost;
it’s the inclusion where you must begin,
but only end up if and when you’re lost.
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