gershon hepner Poems

Some Catholics declare they’re lapsed
when they have found their faith’s collapsed,
while Jews start breaking Moses’ laws
once they have put their faith on pause.
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Those who are apocalipstick,
preaching to the prim and proud,
must resent the heretic
from Gotham City, Maureen Dowd.
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Can’t you hear the screams that people all around
call silence, and ignore?
You could, perhaps, if you were open to their sound,
responding to their roar
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You won’t find in foxholes an atheist, and
in financial crises there are
no ideologues. Where you can’t understand
what happens when you lower the bar
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A famous poet and a critic,
Elysian, and yet mephitic,
So wise, and yet, as he would edit,
So prejudicially wrong-headed.
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Rosa sat so Martin would be able
to march; both helped Obama run.
The centerpiece you see upon the table
is always what impresses everyone.
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Engaged from birth in constant brawls,
Old Hickory won battles that were strange
avoiding British cannonballs,
becoming twenty dollars minus change.
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If poetry’s pronounced prosaic,
like Prozac thought to be archaic,
prescribed for those who are depressed,
with prose preferred by all the rest,
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Arethusa, when pursued
by a river god, became
a fountain, since she wondered who’d
record the story of her shame
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Myths and monuments remind us
that while we choose to look ahead
there stands a theater behinds us
where dramas are revived and read,
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