Mona Lisa Poem by gershon hepner

Mona Lisa

Rating: 5.0


Your head a pendulum at rest
is frozen on my chest like Mona Lisa’s,
your body that I’d earlier undressed
like the adulteress woman saved by Jesus,
framed by my arms, protected from
the slings or arrows of outrageous fortune,
and stones thrown by a Peeping Tom
behind locked doors, a summer afternoon.
Into infinity your eyes
are dreaming, and you wonder if I love you.
How could I not? You are my prize,
as I have just said when I lay above you.


Inspired by Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mona Lisa, ” which contains the following lines:

So I’m here
you see I’m here

I hadn’t a hope
but I’m here

laboriously smiling on
resin-colored mute convex

as if constructed out of lenses
concave landscape for a background

between the blackness of her back
which is like a moo in clouds
and the first tree in the surroundings
is a great void froths of light
so I’m here
sometimes it was
sometimes it seemed that
don’t even think about it

only her regulated smile
her head a pendulum at rest

her eyes dream into infinity
but in her glances snails are asleep

9/10/07

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