After Romance Of The Damned Poem by gershon hepner

After romance of the damned
in a distant archipelago
the veteran, once he’d been Vietnamed,
discovered war won’t let a fellah go.

What determines one’s whole life
can make a person turn into a mensch;
before he proves this to his wife
he learns about it from a willing wench.


Inspired by a comment R. J. Kitaj made, explaining his experiences in the merchant marine that inspired a 1960 painting from “In Our Time” called “O’Neill” reproduced in “The Prints of R. B. Kitaj, ” by Jean Kinsman, with an afterword by the artist (Scolar Press,1994) :

…first romance in a brothel archipelago which would determine one’s whole life romance of the damned…But if it didn’t, it would make one a mensch.

1/15/08