Boxed In By Words Poem by gershon hepner

Boxed In By Words



Boxed in by words, I have been scarred,
and by them marked like branded cattle
when adversaries with me have sparred
and won a ding-dong verbal battle.
I’ve found the best way to escape
is often not with words that fight
on paper or the cyberscape,
for verbal might may not be right.
The rest is silence is for cows
an epitaph they must accept,
and often one that I’ve espoused
when I, boxed in, find I’ve been swept
away. For being unaroused,
wrapped in the comfort of sad stories
that won’t end while I still recall
past triumphs and extinguished glories
on which the present casts its pall,
is surely the best way to counter
the words that scar and mark like brands,
avoiding Hamlet’s strange encounter
with ghosts who make their reprimands.

Charles Isherwood writes about a new play by the Irish playwright and director Enda Walsh, “The New Electric Ballroom, ” which is being performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe:

Words, in Mr. Walsh’s harsh but illuminating vision, are both the making of experience and its destruction. The cursed gift of speech has been used to isolate and humiliate the sisters.(“Branded, marked and scarred by talk, ” Breda scowls. “Boxed by words.” Speak we must, of course, as both sisters attest in one of the most dense, musical monologues that they recite in turn. “By their nature people are talkers, they gabble as if by rote. “You can’t deny that. You could, but you’d be affirming what you’re trying to argue against and what would be the point of that? ” And so talk they do, wrapping themselves in the strange comfort of a sad story that will never end. But can words, the soiling, unworthy but unavoidable things, also be used to make a makeshift bridge to a life-changing connection, a release into a sunlit future? The unfolding of the drama in “The New Electric Ballroom” keeps us on edge as we await the answer, a prickly sense of doom waxing and waning as the sisters move through their ordained roles in a ghoulish, private pageant.


8/29/08

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