Like A Woman

Like a girl my baby aches
and like a woman she
tells all the world she never breaks,
but can’t break free of me.

Like a girl my baby takes
whatever she can see,
but like a woman never makes
her own way to be free.

Like a girl my baby wakes
when it is time to pee,
but like a woman fills like lakes
when we are I and she.

Like a girl my baby quakes
when we two disagree,
but like a woman she awakes
when she and I are we.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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It's Necessary To Talk About Trees

IT'S NECESSARY TO TALK ABOUT THE TREES

It's necessary to talk about the trees
which are being sacrificed by men
who, spreading like a virulent disease,
uncaring as a cruel carcinogen,
destroy their habitat and fill the air
with gases trees once would transform to ox-
ygen. Now no less helpless than the sheep
which could not understand the paradox
proclaiming that their sacrifice might keep
the slaughterers from harm, the trees men chop
or burn are forced to waste their chlorophyll
as sheep were forced to waste their blood. To stop
arboreal holocaust transcends the will
of those who know if we can't coexist
with trees we all will disappear like them.
Like sheep, the trees of course cannot resist,
unable to protest ad hominem.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Qualified Apologies

QUALIFIED APOLOGIES, HONESTY, RULES, AVOCADOES AND PILSNER URQUELL

Any qualified apology is no
apology. If it comes with defense,
the moral high ground always turns into the low,
weighed down because you're sitting on a fence.

If being honest is the goal, you must unzip
to what you reckon is the deepest level;
but say tomorrow what you say today; don't flip
or men may rightly think you are a devil.

You must restructure rules to fit your deepest need,
for rules are made in order to be broken.
Any person who to stupid rules pays heed
to reality has hardly woken.

Avocado's like a perfect argument,
providing all a back-up that is great.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Plant An Apple Tree

Some people once to Martin Luther turned
and asked: “What would you do, sir, if you learned
the world would end tomorrow? ” to which he
replied: “Good question. Plant an apple tree.

If they would ask me the same question, I
would say: “Here’s what I’d do before I die.
I’d write a poem, which I would address
to God. Perhaps He hardly could care less
about my verses than He does about
the tree of Luther and can do without
them both, but I will challenge Him to find
a poem He can plant inside His mind.

James Newton Howard whose 'Defiance' score competed for an Academy Award has written a 19-minute orchestral piece that will premiere as part of the Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival, beginning Thursday in Costa Mesa. Its inspiration came from a statement by Luther: , as Jon Burlingame reported in the LA Times, February 22,2009:

Howard reflected on the commission recently while seated at a keyboard in his Santa Monica studio. 'This is a soul-cleansing process for me, ' he said, 'to be able to write completely unrestricted, provide my own narrative and work with Carl St.Clair and an orchestra the caliber of Pacific Symphony.' Yet, he added, 'Having no restraints is liberating and terrifying. I can't hide behind a movie - the music will be evaluated on its own merits.' Howard felt he needed a narrative. He remembered a quote from Martin Luther: 'Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.' 'I was struck by the overwhelming positivity of that statement in the face of the possibility of the world ending, ' he said. 'The world is in deep crisis now in so many ways, I wanted it to be about grace in the face of tremendous difficulty. That's what inspired me to begin the piece.'

2/23/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Deeds And Relationships

Deeds that you perform have life
like living beings. Every action
is virtually the deed’s midwife
whose job is to prevent retraction
of something that may either lead
to benefit or punishment,
the punishment part of the deed,
like an investment, spent
long after it has been performed.

We reap from deeds what we have sown
not as a measure made for measure,
but because the deed has grown,
and finally provides displeasure
if the deed was wrong, and when
correct and virtuous can provide
a benefit like interest men
deserve––and God does not deride.

Relationships are forms of deeds––

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Don't Dance Me To The End

Don’t dance me to the end of love, but dance
me to the place where it resumes as if beginning
anew, each time, with nothing left to chance
except the penalties that come from sinning.
Like Babylonians let me feel you moving,
but let us not, before we go to bed,
recall Egyptians with their books approving
the afterlife they dream up for the dead.

While we are dancing, let’s think only of
the here and now, and so together burn
with passion for the life and after-love
that follows us when on one bed we turn,
but when in bed, recalling Babylon
whose waters both our ancestors once drank,
let us remember times that, though bygone,
from memories of lovetimes never shrank.

Inspired by Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Mee to the End of Love”:

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Goody, Goody Giddiness

I feel a giddiness that’s goody, goody,
but cannot sing like Turandot
about it when awarded with a woody,
because to do so would be not
polite unless the gal who brought my woody on
would join me in my aria,
approving of me as no jerk but John
who’s unprepared to marry her.

Inspired by Anthony Tommasini’s review of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini’s Turandot, with Lise Lindstrom singing the title part, Marcello Giordani taking the part of Prince Calàf and Marina Poplavskaya as Liù (“He’s Come to Melt the Heart of an Ice Princess, ” NYT, October 30,2009) :
Though Ms. Lindstrom may not have the biggest Turandot voice, she sang with chilling power and nailed the top notes. Her sound was impressively focused, with a vibrant vibrato on sustained tones and no wobble. The youthful shimmer of her singing was balanced by rich emotional maturity. Yet there was often a hard edge to her sound, not quite strident but close. Whether this coloring is simply a characteristic of her voice or a sign of strain for a singer in her early 40s is the question. Her performance was strong. But I worry about her future. After Act II, when Ms. Lindstrom took her first curtain call and was greeted by a lusty ovation, she certainly broke character, jumping in place, clapping her hands with “goody, goody” giddiness, looking like the California gal that, after all, she is. It was hard to adjust my perception of her for Act III….The most complete performance came from the elegant Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya as Liù, the slave girl devoted to Timur and in love with Calàf. She sang with warmth, beautifully earthy colorings and captivating pianissimo high notes. And Zeffirelli fans mourning the retirement of his “Tosca” production can flock to the biggest, grandest Zeffirelli show of them all.

10/30/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Montezuma's Anguish

Cortés identified with Quetzalcóatl,
We think we know the story, but don’t know it all.
In writing stories of the people whom we vanquish,
how can we understand king Montezuma’s anguish?
It’s only with unconscionable audacity
that we consider science and sagacity
enable us to understand those we defeat
like open books to which we are the exegete.

Inspired by an article in the TLS, July 31,2009, by J. H. Elliott on the Boston gentleman-scholar William Hickling Prescott, the author of History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) . Criticizing Prescott’s approach, Elliott, former Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, writes:

As part of this process of re-evaluation, historians try to recover “the vision of the vanquished” and to reconstruct the history of “peoples without history”, victims not only of imperial domination but also the lack of written records....

Montezuma’s assumed identification of Cortés with Quetzalcóatl has been a staple element of the story from Prescott’s day to our own, but it has also come to be contested as a post-conquest fabrication. Equally the omens have been shown to have suspicious affinities with the omens and prodigies recorded by classical authors like Plutarch, Lucan and Josephus. If the Quetzalcóatl myth and the story of the omens are no more than retrospective attempts to make sense of the extraordinary succession of events, Prescott’s doom-laden interpretation of Montezuma’s behaviour loses much of its credibility….Was he killed by stones thrown by his own rebellious subjects, as the account commonly goes, or was he put to death by the Spaniards, as one or two alternative sources suggest? Or did he perhaps die “as much under the anguish of a wounded spirit, as under disease”, as Prescott ws inclined to believe?

8/15/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Tenth Commandment Explained

Madame Bovary could cheerfully have carried
on adultering if she had not run out
of money, which is something you can’t do without
when having an affair with someone who is married.

Money helps support adultery, that’s why
the people coveting their neighbor’s spouse
will also covet things they own, their house
a means to pay for the adultery they play.

Inspired by Margaret Atwood, who told Deborah Solomon in an interview in the NYT Magazine, September 28,2008 that Madam Bovary that it was overspending that caused Madam Bovary’s adultery to come to a premature end:
As one of Canada’s most esteemed novelists and poets, you are about to deliver a series of public lectures on a seemingly nonliterary subject, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, ” which is also the title of your latest book. Your timing is perfect. Well, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make those banks collapse.
I thought maybe you made the banks fail in order to help your book sales. I didn’t even consider it. When I came up with the idea two or three years ago and planned out the lectures, this was not on the horizon. Everybody was happily buying subprime-mortgage vehicles.
So what led you to take up the subject of debt? Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent.
Are you saying we should view her as a pioneer of deficit spending? You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

9/29/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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God's Repentance On Yom Kippur

Tricks are narrative competing
in contests for belief
between two parties never meeting
halfway. Like a thief,
each party steals attention that
the other party claims,
asserting it can smell a rat
when those whom it calls names
have narratives they think support
their versions. All is fair
in battles that are fought in court
when truth is not laid bare,
as narratives compete in trials
while neither party budges,
though both may be waylaid by wiles
and knowing winks of judges,
allowing dubious evidence
to help the parties whom
they favor, and this way dispense
their verdicts that spell doom

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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