Braille Poem by gershon hepner

My body’s Braille, but far less famous
than that attributed to Seamus.
I mean the body of my work,
that like a confidential clerk
I daily feel I must produce,
in order not just to seduce
the reader, but to clarify
ideas that otherwise would die
if left to wither in the mind,
invisible like words the blind
cannot perceive until they touch
their elevated forms. I try
to elevate my thoughts when I
put them into a poem. That
is why my body’s Braille, not flat,
although deflated somewhat when
it’s read by semiliterate men
who are not used to reading Braille
written by a Jew or Gael.

The poem has a final quatrain that Linda has advised me to omit, claiming that the poem is stronger without it. I have therefore removed it, cutting the birth-cords.

synthesized in synagogue
or cut like birth-cords in a bog,
rising from the dark like gleams
that shine upon undrafted dreams.


Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem “Bog Queen”:

I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.

My body was braille
For the creeping influence:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled at my feet,

through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots

pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting

on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts’

soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the muzzle of fjords
at my thighs—

the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.
My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turfcutter’s spade

who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
between the stone jambs
at my head and my feet.

Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut

and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.

3/16/09