gershon hepner Poems

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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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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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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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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When they sang the song of hope
in Bergen Belsen, bodies which
had not yet been transformed to soap
or shoveled off into a ditch
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Said the actress: “Take a peek and
determine whether I am fecund.
If flesh is willing
I’ll be billing
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Wages of past time,
like imperatives of sex,
unravel like weak rhyme,
compounded often with complex
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More and more now married women cheat
no less than do their husbands. Oh, alack!
In offices––no need for bars––they meet,
and very soon they end up in the sack
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“She’s ruined mah play! ” cried Tennessee,
from the balcony at Geraldine,
who’d taken it from him, to be
her own. That’s why the playwright made a scene,
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