Promise Poem by gershon hepner

Promise is guilt, capacity
for letting people down;
without more than audacity
you’re just a proper noun.
Innocence is not enough;
you must take with tenacity
roads others don’t, not try to bluff
with perspicacity.
To be coming isn’t what
a person with sagacity
requires. After being hot,
men come to incapacity.

Joseph Epstein writes about Cyril Connolly, whose most famous book is “Eenmies of Promise, ” in the November 2008 issue of The New Criterion:

When Maurice Bowra, then a young don and not yet Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, used to introduce Cyril Connolly, a man six years his junior, he would say, “This is Connolly. Coming man.” After which he paused, then added, “Hasn’t come yet.” Nor would Cyril Connolly come—not quite, never ever, really, at least not by his own lights. To be promising when young can be a terrible thing, for one’s promise all too often turns out to be a pledge on which one isn’t able to deliver. “Promise is guilt, ” Connolly would write in his thirties, “promise is the capacity for letting people down.”

12/3/08