Requiem Poem by gershon hepner

It came to him the other day,
and happened quite the very way
he had predicted. Empty, old,
his promise had been oversold,
and so, to greet his sad demise,
it hardly came as a surprise
that you could not see many mourners,
except the ones who cut the corners
of their garments, daughter, sons
and wife. A few will miss his puns,
a tragic figure, like Falstaff,
and––what the Hal! ––may even laugh.
Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz,
recorded in their requiem
their grief, but he would decompose
with comments made ad hominem.


Inspired by a poem by John Updike “Requiem, ” that will be published in a posthumous collection of his poems (“Endpoint and Other Poems”) , quoted in the NYT Op-ed page on January 29,2009:

Requiem
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable! ”
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register


1/29/09