Myths And Monuments Poem by gershon hepner

Myths and monuments remind us
that while we choose to look ahead
there stands a theater behinds us
where dramas are revived and read,
for monuments, like megaliths,
recall an unfamiliar past,
when men fought men creating myths
with heroes like us in the cast.
Unless too petrified, could we
allow their struggles to embolden us
to think our lives by theirs can be
revised, revived, and told in us?
Not if we think of myths as mon-
uments of stone, and bound in books
not as a prolegomenon
to lives we lead on tenterhooks.

I can’t remember what inspired this poem in 2001, but the revision I made today, adding the last two quatrain, was inspired by my own poem, “Arethusa”.


11/10/08