Feather Brains Poem by gershon hepner

A duster with feathers cannot lay an egg,
but a woman who’s gorgeous but hasn’t much brains
can achieve by exposing a breast or a leg
far more than an ugly one when she complains.

Inspired by Kai Maristed’s review of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, “The Lacuna, ” in the LA Times, November 3,2009 (“Trotsky’s Time in America”) :

A lavishly gifted writer, Kingsolver has not let success breed complacency. This novel, her first in nine years, feels prodigiously researched. Its confident pacing mines roughly a quarter-century in two countries, landing the hero in the midst of events that cast long shadows toward our own time: the attack on defenseless Depression-era Bonus Marchers by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's cavalry, the inspiring ingenuity of the home front during World War II, the subsequent creep to power of the House Un-American Activities Committee. But these compressed scenes sometimes resemble sidebars in a U.S. history text. And in order to cover broader background - the history of the Aztecs' subjugation by Cortez, or power plays in the early Soviet Union - Kingsolver resorts to lengthy expository dialogue, with naive Shepherd playing Candide to Trotsky and other Panglosses met along the way. What saves these pages from pure artificiality is Kingsolver's wonderful ear for the quirks of human repartee. 'The Lacuna' is richly spiked with period language. Harken to Violet's voice: 'April... a joyful month if there ever was one, you'd think. Even a feather duster will lay an egg in April.'

For all of Violet's spunk and Shepherd's wryness, 'The Lacuna' paints a sad and steady downward spiral. Tragedy rubs up against maudlin. And the title? Lacuna is Latin for a thing missing. Certainly there is no dearth of symbolic openings, holes and gaps - including a lost notebook and Shepherd's scarcely explored homosexuality - scattered throughout. But there is no enigma. The good guys wear white hats, the villains black. This book grabs at the heartstrings, and you would give it to a 13-year-old without hesitation... except for that nagging problem of historical truth. Even a card-carrying leftie (a literal term from the '40s, once applied to my father) cannot swallow the airbrushed portrait of Trotsky, in reality a boundless egotist and architect of ruthless collectivization, as a social-democratic Santa Claus.

I thought of adding a second verse to this poem, but decided against it:

When Frida, Diego and Trotsky all met
they thought they’d have fun when together they played
till a man came to dust away Trotsky, a threat
to the bad eggs that Stalin in Moscow had laid.

11/3/09