Sinning Against Truth Poem by gershon hepner

Don’t sin against truth by which you are pained
while trying to make all your past sublimated;
make sure that the things about which you’ve complained
in prose are in poetry not overstated.

Writing about Anna Akhmatova Orlando Figes cites Joseph Brodsky (“Anna the Great, ” NYR, June 22,2006) :

[As a poet] submits to the demands of the muse, the language [articulates]..a greater truth than the experience…Inadvertently you sin against the ordinary truth, against your own pain.

6/11/06