Alive Enough Poem by gershon hepner

Alive enough to spawn and die
we are like salmon without gills,
and breathe our last beneath a sky
polluted by satanic mills.

Inspired by a poem called “Waking Early Sunday Morning” by Robert Lowell, and, of course, William Blake’s “Jerusalem”:

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall-
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.


7/30/03