Welter And Waste Poem by gershon hepner

My heart is a world filled with welter and waste,
dilemma with which I am constantly faced
when I have a choice and I do not quite know who
to take as my sweetheart. It’s tohu wa’bohu
according to biblical authors in Genesis
who wrote of an emptiness full of great menaces,
long before Eve gave her lover an apple
whose core caused them both, when expelled from the chapel
called Eden, to enter a wasteland as weltered
as where their descendants have ever since sheltered.
Since Genesis 1,2 it’s all plus ça change,
with champagne for devils, for saints mere blancmange.


Robert Alter (The five Books of Moses) translates tohu wa’bohu in Gen.1: 2, commonly translated as “waste and void, ” as “welter and waste”. Only a pedant or one of King James I’s fancy boys could quarrel with that.

5/8/06