Good Place Poem by gershon hepner

Good Place



The good place is not one we find.
However many people hate us
in places that we leave behind,
moves won’t establish a hiatus
unless we change ourselves, not just
the place. If you are a curmudgeon
you won’t be helped by wanderlust,
wherever you may move to sojourn,
and change of air won’t blow away
what sadly can’t be disavowed,
bad odor with which you dismay
the ones around your stale fart cloud.

being disagreeable
will make your problems last, because
they’re you, and are not fleeable,
like flushes of the menopause
that time or hormones cure. To find
the good place you must be a person
who everywhere is good, the kind
of person who no place will worsen.

Inspired by a recitation of “Change of Air” by W. H. Auden, which Linda and I heard en route to the funeral of Paul Tashman, a beloeved man of commerce, in Commerce, CA:
All his life, Auden sought for 'the Good Place' where friendship and love reigned. He travelled expensively, visited and lived in Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Iceland, Spain and China, before settling finally in the United States in 1939. He tells of some of his experiences abroad in the second part of About The House, which carries the heading 'In and Out'. What this sense of continuous displacement teaches him, however - is that all journeys take you back home - 'Where luck and instinct originally brought you' and nothing has changed in your 'love, ideas, or diet: / Your sojourn Elsewhere will remain a Wordless/ Hiatus in your voluble biography' ('A Change of Air') . As Alan Bold explains, Auden came to realise that the good place is 'no longer somewhere to be looked for but somewhere to be made'. What is to be made is home and it can only be made by the individual man - the unique person carrying his personal stamp as well as the stamp of the human race.


7/25/08

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Raynette Eitel 25 July 2008

Although there is much truth in this, Gershon, it is too 'preachy' for my taste. Raynette

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