Impermanence Poem by gershon hepner

Impermanence



The permanence of things and the impermanence
of people neither is surprising nor a paradox;
every planet has a star and firmaments,
and thinks that it finds balance in the equinox,
but though we reach to stars and try to emulate
their immortality and bring them down to our own level,
our limitations merely let us simulate
God’s handiwork, a challenge only equal to the devil.

Steve Wasserman writes about Czeslaw Milosz, who has just turned 90, in the LA Times Book Review, July 1,2001:

All his life, Milosz has seen time “as an hourglass through which states, systems and civilization trickle like sand”. His favorite playgrounds as a boy were cemeteries with their “stone crosses above carefully kept flowers, or wooden ones half-hidden in thickets of blackberries and raspberries; they bore the names Schultz, Mueller and Hildebrand.” He has observed: “The permanence of things and the impermanence of people is always surprising.”

7/3/01

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