Humor And Humility Poem by gershon hepner

Nemesis while being stealthy
stalks the people hubris maims
while playing, wise and strong and wealthy,
their non-Olympian games.

Humor and humility,
antidotes on your behalf,
divert from you hostility
by making those you play with laugh.

John Seabrook writes about nutmeg and the spice islands in “Soldiers and Spices’ (The New Yorker, August 13,2001) , describing a journey to Pulau Run, an island in the Moluccas which the British exchanged for Manhattan in the Treaty of Brado in 1667. Seabrook quotes Conrad:

“I have seen the mysterious shores, ” Marlow says of the East in Conrad’s story “Youth, ”….”where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength.”

This poem is based on a Vorlage called “Nemesis, ” the first quatrain, which I wrote on 8/18/01,

1/23/10