Spying Poem by gershon hepner

Though poets spend their lives in spying,
invading inner lives and feelings,
and, word-addicted, prone to lying,
with double-meanings double dealing,
violate the many veils
that hide you from your inner being,
and strip you bare, versed with details
invisible to your own seeing,
you should excuse their rude invasion,
inviting these wordmen to share
the parts that they, without persuasion,
perceive and glorify, made bare.

Inspired by William Grimes’s review of Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (“The Dictator as a Young Poet-Thug, ” NYT, October 19,2007) :
Stalin was, Mr. Montefiore writes, “that rare combination: both ‘intellectual’ and killer.” The roots of violence ran deep in his family life and in Gori, his hometown, where street brawling was the principal sport. Soso, as Stalin, born Josef Djugashvili, was called, suffered savage beatings from both his alcoholic father and his doting mother, who alternated smothering affection with harsh corporal punishment. When Stalin, later in life, asked his mother why she had beaten him so much, she replied, “It didn’t do you any harm.” A brilliant but rebellious student at the religious schools he attended, and a published poet of great promise, Soso took up radical politics while still in his teens, his approach already shaped by the tactics of the seminary’s administration — “surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings, ” as he later described them. Taking the name Koba, that of a fictional Caucasian bandit-hero (Stalin, or “man of steel, ” would come much later) , he embarked on a career as an underground political agitator, his life punctuated by multiple arrests and years spent in internal exile.


10/19/07