Laughter Poem by gershon hepner

The laughter that they took to be the whole
of him was really like a decimal,
a tiny point that tithed his tragic soul
before his grief infinitesimal.


Despite his ability to make others laugh until the day he died, accompanied by Halley’s Comet as at birth, Mark Twain’s life was so full of tragedy that he became deeply hostile to the platitudes associated with religion. He once said: 'It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought-a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! ' At his funeral his friend William Dean Howells said: 'I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it; something of a puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broken in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. I knew them all-sages, poets, peers, critics, humorists-but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.'

1/15/02