Junk Poem by gershon hepner

Society is bound to crash,
enveloped as it is by junk,
surrounded everywhere by trash
with grades that fail and make it flunk.
Recycling junk is not the answer,
for trash has made the world's diseases
incurable–can't cut out cancer
or stop the dying of the species
when junk is everywhere and trash
the currency we pay for wealth,
in plastic, preferably, not cash,
a price that's ruining our health,
but since it seems we must have junk
with trash for company I say
we ought not merely to debunk
them both, but ought to pray.


Richard Bernstein deplores the fact that people are no longer reading literary biographies in spite of the fact that many excellent ones have been written recently, for example on T. S. Eliot, Isak Dinesen, Coleridge, Colette, Graham Greene and Gore Vidal, while excellent new biographies on Saul Bellow and George Sand are about to be published ('The Effort of a Lifetime for Biographer and Subject, ' The New York Times, October 28,1999) . Bernstein writes:

In the age of 'The X-Files' and 'Lethal Weapon 9' (or whatever number we're up to now) , it's reassuring that room can still be made for ancient instrument ensembles, newly discovered cuts of 'Grand Illusion' and prolonged examinations of the lives and works of the writers. That our culture still produces long literary biographies tells us that we are not engulfed by junk after all, that the bottom line does not determine absolutely everything.

10/28/99