Only Connect Poem by gershon hepner

Pinteresque the silences and pauses,
no Churchillian purple in the prose,
lost the hope in our Chekhovian causes,
Hamlet is our hero, I suppose.

Can’t connect––why did the man say “only”
in his aphoristic Indian passage?
“Godot will not wait for us though lonely, ”
seems today to be the only message.


Daniel Mendelsohn, writing about Harold Pinter in the NYR, October 4,2001 (“Harold Pinter’s Celebration”) , says:

Over the years, Pinter has won a dedicated audience who have found a curious comfort in his bleak dramatizations of the way in which our unwillingness or inability to make connections, to communicate meaningfully (here you think of those famous Pinteresque silences and pauses) , lead to disasters both private and public.


10/1/01