Poetry by Gershon Hepner

Analog arrogance cannot prevail
when digitally you've been recorded,
ubiquitous cellphones may cause you to fail
if rude or dishonest or sordid.
Wherever you go now you may leave a trail,
like a dog or a cat does by pissing,
and you may be hanged on a cross by a nail
unless you use discipline dissing
the people whom dearly you want to impale,
for digital records are fatal,
and when you are writing use mail like a snail,
for e-mail can shatter your shtetl.

Frank Rich writes about Hillary Clinton's egregious lies about her journey to Bosnia during her husband's second term ("Hillary's St. Patrick's Day Massacre, " NYT, March 20,2008) :
MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton's Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses? In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of "sniper fire" into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn't be true because by the time of the first lady's visit in March 1996, "the war was over." Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the "Today" show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: "I think the only 'red phone' moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place? " Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a "comedian" and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick's Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of "four Pinocchios, " her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to "Morning Joe" on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was "possible" she "misspoke" in the "most recent instance" of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure%u2026. Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tuzla, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush's flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during "Mission Accomplished." That Mrs. Clinton's campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton - though surely knowing her story was false - thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady's foreign trip - as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night - and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web. The Drudge Report's link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program's nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest "comeback" on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of "sleep deprivation" and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright%u2026. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate's control of a message. The 2008 campaign is, unsurprisingly enough, mostly of a piece with 2006, when Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. In that year's signature race, a popular Senate incumbent, George Allen, was defeated by a war opponent in the former Confederate bastion of Virginia after being caught race-baiting in a video posted on the Web. Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

3/30/08

Caring more about analysis
of guilt than of achieving
success, the western world's paralysis
helps adversaries who fight the unbelieving.
Intelligence is now outsourced
to countries ready to be ruthless,
and force, by terrorists endorsed,
now renders their opponents toothless.

Alessandra Stanley ("Beyond the News, Reminders of the War, " NYT, March 20,2007) describes the effect the war in Iraq is having on television shows, and quotes a statement made in "Sleeper Cell" by Farik, the head of a sleeper cell who hides his identity by becoming Amram, the executive director of a synagogue which in real life is the Sephardic Temple near Westwood. Farik's comment, cited below, strikes me as particularly apposite in the light of an analysis of terror made by Aharon Barak, former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, one week ago at UCLA Law School, where he made it clear that he felt that the human rights of terrorists trumped death threats to Israeli civilians and the Israel Defense Force. It was a great analysis, because the man is a genius, but it depressed non-liberals in the audience.

Last season "Sleeper Cell, " a series on Showtime, dramatized the opposite argument: the terrorist leader, Farik, sat in a C.I.A. prison, withstanding gruesome psychological and physical torture and taunting his captors about their ambivalence about such methods. "You Americans are so obsessed with yourselves, " Farik says, "that you care more about analyzing your guilt than achieving victory. That is why we will win, and you will lose." (The C.I.A. outsources him to the less inhibited interrogators in Saudi Arabia.)

3/20/07

They used to think that it was drought
that drove the Anasazi out
of southwest cities on the mesas,
to die there, like forgotten races.
We still don't understand the basis
of their departure without traces,
though many tried hard to discover
what happened and what made them suffer;
their lights went out, their end was sudden,
the Anasazi sheep were mutton.
Though we don't know, we speculate,
and, curious, ask what was the date
when, flames extinguished, they all ran
on empty to the final man?

On Anasazi fell no rain.
No man or woman could remain
where many centuries they'd sojourned
before by blasted climate bludgeoned.
First came the hunger, then the thirst,
women, children dying first,
then after that expiring men,
though we don't know precisely when.
(Of course it's guesswork in the main,
except the absence of the rain.)
Skies were cloudless and the rivers
died as dehydrated slivers
that etched the ground where flowing water
once ran throughout the southwest quarter.
Life departed, no companions
in the Arizona canyons.
No more streams or maize or orchards,
population cracked like potsherds
scattered to this day on mesas,
museum quality the traces,
most outstanding pottery
by losers of life's lottery,
expelled (not by Athenian lots) ,
devoid of life as broken pots,
transformed from haves into have-nots,
sans tombstones and sans burial plots.

If cause of death was not external
that brought them to an end infernal,
perhaps some fights internecine
consumed them like a furnace in
societies erstwhile pacific.
Yet there's no evidence specific
that they once hunted men like falcons,
as Serbs once did, when in the Balkans
they hunted Muslims whom they'd martyr,
ignoring Rights of Humans charter,
men and women, babies even,
genocidal, unGenevan.
When Nazis ruled, how many Germans
wrote pamphlets or delivered sermons,
or spoke out bravely to oppose
the horrors of the World War woes;
men died like cattle, shorn of hope,
ignored by President and Pope,
six million Jews allowed to perish.
The Anasazis' death, less garish,
provides us with no evidence
of acts like these whose consequence
might offer us an explanation
for their occult extermination.

Perhaps with crisis of the spirit
Anasazis all were wearied,
putting faith in dolls, kachinas,
which, by trusting minds, were seen as
alternatives to gods, since they
were thought to have a kinder way
about them, showing more concern
than gods who, like the Comintern,
were merely on a power trip.
They found the dolls were far more hip
and, when handled, far more pleasant
than gods who, although omnipresent,
seemed like the priests to be evasive
and, bottom line, quite unpersuasive
compared with dolls which seemed to smile,
quite genuine though juvenile,
not false and past their prime as were
the ancient gods in their hauteur,
but reasonable and sociable,
regarding as negotiable
all problems that, environmental,
the gods ignored as accidental,
responsibility refusing
for water loss, themselves recusing.

Because the gods had failed, most folk
now put their faith in dolls--no joke!
It's said that real men do not play
with dolls, but these men used to pray
to them, when told: "Repent, adore
kachinas, for they offer more
than former gods, who're old and tired--
kachinas are far more inspired,
and helpful: they don't bear a grudge,
and, more importantly, don't judge! "
They prayed to dolls to send them water,
and irrigate this southwest quarter.
Perhaps, abandoning their gods
brought them a respite against odds,
though once they'd lost their gods in heaven
they lost their chance of breaking even.

Though old men with kachinas played,
they didn't love them; while they prayed
to them, and hoped that they'd respond,
of puppets they weren't really fond.
They clung to old gods they'd deserted.
If rain fortuitously squirted
from heavens, they would praise kachinas,
but found hypocrisy most heinous,
and hated their capitulation
to feigned kachina adoration.
For with hypocrisy came quibbles,
once drinking water slowed to dribbles,
downplaying help the dolls provided,
a provenance that they derided.
Enfeebled by their faithless folly
that caused them to adopt a dolly,
dispirited, they slowly perished,
still pining for the gods they'd cherished.

They should have listened from their kiva
to words once spoken by Akiva,
who loved his God till death although
He'd made His brimstone lava-flow.
While Romans singed him like a coal,
he concentrated on his soul,
and, dying said: "Shema, oh hear
how God to me is always dear.
Although He takes my life from me
I won't turn to apostasy."
They gained so little, Anasazis,
their Reich as fragile as the Nazis',
who, like them, gave up on their God
while hunting in a brownshirt squad,
until with hubris they succumbed
when God his finger at them thumbed
and made them disappear forever.
Were Anasazi like this, ever,
not cruel, I mean, but doomed to fall
because they had no gods at all?

Your guess is quite as good as mine!
Say, what's your poison? Mine is wine.
Drinking helps me to forget
that God's forgotten me, and yet
it dulls the pain, for I remember
the snows that come back in December
to whiten paths that, autumn bloodied
with leaves that orange, red and muddied,
clothe frozen ground like colored pelts.
Every year this same snow melts
quite imperceptibly in spring,
when all young creatures have a fling,
and most, forgetting yesterday,
believe that there's still time to play
a haunting theme, like Harry Lyme,
in music or with prose or rhyme,
that calls all lovers hither, thither,
unaware that they will wither.
As hair that's lost on heads turned bald,
forgotten, God can't be recalled;
Unlike the seasons of the year
that come back every year, God-fear
is disappearing. On the grounds
where He once walked he does no rounds,
a doctor who has lost his patience
with Jews and all the other nations.

Visible on no soul screen,
I'll go where I have never been,
not, Anasazi, to betray
my God, although my hair is grey.
In winter, when my pots are broken,
I'll tell my friends, who'll think I'm joking:
"Be true to God, though He throws low balls--
and in the winter play with snowballs,
and after snow melts, don't forget
how, costumed as a fair coquette,
the spring will blossom, and the flowers
will follow, blooming, April showers,
and colors that are less than sober
begin in fall by mid-October.
So sing in perfect harmony
a Benedictus Domine
to God who is the only Caster
of lots that make him blessed Master
of destinies. Though He won't come
for blessings, we must all succumb,
not treating friends worse than a brother,
or changing Him for any other,
not even for a moment, quasi,
as happened to the Anasazi.

My friends will say: "You joke! " and think
my lights must be out on the blink.
But only when we make this link
can we aspire to hoodwink
the gods who don't control the planet,
though some believe that they began it
and for millennia even ran it,
and worshipped them in wood and granite.
The world is threatened now with doom,
and even gods who, we assume,
do not exist, will not relume
the buried light man can't exhume,
nor Mother Nature, who now grieves
about the carbon prints he leaves
behind, and selfishly bereaves
the earth, while he no more believes.

9/2/96,5/11/07

If you should ask for anchovies
on pizza you should know
that though they add much zest to cheese
and flavor to the dough
once they've been pickled in a cask
where they are tightly packed
that they derive their name from Basque,
perhaps a useless fact.

According to Margalit Fox, who says that the Oxford English Dictionary will be on the Web at the end of 1999 ('The O.E.D. Adds the Web to its Lexicon: Putting the Dictionary on Line Means Taking a Modern Approach to a Century of Tradition, ' in the Circuits section of The New York Times,11/5/98) , anchovy, jai alai and jingo all have Basque roots. Jingo may come from a Basque word meaning God and was first used by magicians around 1670, according to my O.E.D. chaparral is also Basque.

On May 31,2006 Anna Russell responded to this poem thus:

Response from This Veggie

Before you ask for anchovies
there's one thing you should know
they once had mums and daddies,
their corpse is in your dough.

11/5/98

Where are the speakers of ancient Akkadian?
Who was the last man who wrote Linear B?
When in the bayous will there be no Cajun?
What use are Targums for those who can't see
the difference between words that were long ago said
and shadows they cast when translated too late:
the errors while reading the works of the dead
are ones that no scholarship can penetrate.

John Leonard reviews "Heir to the Glimmering World, " by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin) (NYT, September 5,2004, "Sects and the City") . Ozick's novel is about a scholar of Karaism:

Otherwise, ''Heir to the Glimmering World'' is both a chambered nautilus and a haunted house - a fairy tale with locked rooms, mad songs, secret books and stolen babies. And a children's story, an Oedipal grief, about killing fathers and moving on. And a sendup of Victorian novels that solve their problems with fortuitous marriage, sudden death, miraculous inheritance, emigration to Australia or all of the above. But also a grim parable about ''purifications'' - by fundamentalist ascetics like the Karaites, repudiators of the rabbis and Talmudic commentary; by Hindu skeptics like the Nastiks, who mocked the priests in the Upanishads by comparing them to white dogs in a procession, each holding in its mouth the tail of the next in line; by the sages of high German humanism, who conferred on credulous communicants like Rudi and Elsa a counterfeit comfort, a fraudulent dignity, and the illusion of a bildung whose possession meant you were ''more than merely cultivated, '' you were ''ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom''; and, of course, by National Socialism, with its death-camp refinements%u2026.
And there is a whole disputatious literature of Karaism out of Babylon, Cairo and Leningrad, of, by and for literalists, apostates and lunatics, ''inked letters seeping through the backs of the pages of old chronicles: faint glyphs glimmering, just visible, an inside-out alphabet'' - even without our having to pronounce on the veracity of the two pages purporting to be a fragment of a 10th-century treatise on the Bhagavad-Gita by the brainiest of all the Karaites during their golden age, Jacob al-Kirkisani: ''I, Jacob, am become Arjuna, '' he may have said. Or is this another of Ozick's forgeries, like the Yiddish poems in ''Envy'' (''Where are the speakers of ancient Etruscan? Who was the last man to write poems in Linear B''?) or the Stockholm ''Messiah'' that Bruno Schulz certainly never imagined (a scarecrow, a windmill, with sails, flippers, petals and tattoos) ?

9/5/04

The memory of heritage encoded
in rituals which we cannot understand
will disappear when truths become outmoded,
replaced by platitudes the times demand,
but though the wisdom may appear eroded,
the rituals won't, for poets all adore them,
and with great scholars' help they'll be decoded,
till, seeking wisdom, people will restore them.

John Lahr reviews the Théâtre du Soleil's production at the Lincoln Center of Ariane Mnouchkine's "Le Dernier Caravansérai" (New Yorker, August 1,2005) . Writing about the world's refugees he says:

7/31/05

The generations of the earth
and heavens are this poem's story:
how man was first to come to birth,
and woman then became his glory.

Before the earth had any trees
and any herbs in fields could sprout,
there lived no man to shoot the breeze,
but since God could not do without
a helper in His earthly garden,
He took some very dirty soil,
and gave it shape and let it harden,
and said: "This is My man. Go toil:
the garden needs your utmost care,
for you are now a special worker.
Try hard, and I will treat you fair,
but punish you if you're a shirker."

God quickly came to realize
this creature was not truly whole,
more like a monkey in disguise,
and so He breathed in Him a soul.
God's spirit into Man's nose entered:
he was an ape, albeit higher
than other apes, though more self-centered,
but one who recognized His Sire,
distinguished thus from early primates,
and destined very soon to spread
to different continents and climates,
once he from Africa had fled,
so he could pleasant pastures win
in continents of Europe and
of Asia till they let him in
America, the promised land.

In the garden then He planted
Man He'd fashioned with great care.
They say the garden was enchanted.
Trees were growing everywhere,
every one with fruit delicious,
ripe and very succulent,
no need there to have the dishes
washed by workers who were truculent,
for all fruit can be eaten raw,
with pits spat out to form new trees,
and peel fed to a tortoise or
to vegetarian devotees.
From the tree straight to the tongue
came the fruit that taste buds tickled
on the branches as they hung,
never needing to be pickled,
needing no illegal alien
to collect the fruit he ate.
like a proud Episcopalian
Man was master of his fate.

One tree only seemed to differ:
most important, Tree of Life,
growing very near a river
called the Stream of Afterlife.
Rivers from the garden four,
Pishon, Gihon, and Euphrates,
and Hiddekel-I'll ignore
one that flowed straight into Hades.
Water nowhere could be clearer,
since these waters could refresh
in that distant, primal era,
friends of men like Gilgamesh-
had he also been there then,
which quite certainly I doubt.
There probably weren't other men
around the garden, since without
the Man whom God made out of clay
the world would not have seen another,
as for of all of us today
He's the Father and the Mother.

God told the Man that he could eat
from all the trees except just one.
Man thought: "This one's a special treat,
but I'm having so much fun
I won't bother with this tree
whose fruit is placed beyond my limit" -
no Special Other present, he
was most obedient and timid.
Said God: "Eat from that one-you die! "
Man did not know quite what that meant,
although he found out by and by,
informed by Woman, whom God sent
to live beside him all his life,
a person whom he could rely on,
a common law or married wife
who offered him a breast to sigh on.

Man had no partner until God
declared: "I think there should be two.
I don't like numbers that are odd.
Man needs a partner he can woo,
a helper who is just like him,
for better surely, and for worse:
he'll love her when she's fair and slim,
and when he's old, she'll be his nurse."
Male chauvinist, some say God is;
the evidence quite contradictory,
although once Miss turned into Ms.
the feminists claimed victory.
God called her eyzer, word translated
as "helper, " though it should be read
as "warrior"-she was created
to fights with genitals and head.

Though Man, who's basically a beast,
had tried all animals to name,
he did not like them in the least.
When mating they had little shame
which made him feel extremely lonely,
and wonder why he had no mate.
God watched him name them and said: "Only
this human being has no date.
I'll make for him a true helpmeet
who'll be beside him all his life."
God kept his word and watched him greet
his helpmeet saying: "That's my wife! "
First Man was chromosomed with Y
some sixty thousand years ago,
most experts say, and then would try
to mix his genes with Woman's roe.
Brian Sykes has said that Y
some day will become extinct:
double-X though will not die,
outlasting genes that are sex-linked.

God formed her from Man's side, not rib-
what most of you have heard of ribs
that God took from her memsahib
is based on foolishness and fibs.
He fashioned Woman from Man's side
which was as holy as the tsela.
the word for "side" you read inside
the stories that the Bible Teller
relates about two holy buildings,
first tabernacle and then temple.
Woman has no need for gilding:
since she's a lily-it's that simple.
The snake, herpetologically
tried tempting her, and not the Man,
because she is, quite logically,
of holiness the female fan
that distributes love's holy breezes.
Not all the world appreciates
the quality that God most pleases,
the kindness that she emanates.
Consider Woman to have been
no cause of primal Adam's fall,
the serpent tempted her as queen,
as holy as a temple wall.

God sent the man into a sleep
profound as deep Pacific canyon,
and when he woke he said: "I'll keep
this woman as my chief companion! "
Soon after both of them would cleave,
and each the other's heart would gladden:
she was most glad he called her Eve,
and he was glad she called him Adam.
Since then there's been lots of cleaving,
wives and husbands leaving mum
and dad, and lovingly receiving
one another to become
one flesh that yearns to be united
when, as if from apes descended,
it's stimulated and excited
so that the chromosomes are blended.

3/24/04,5/29/06,3/20/07

He thought he remembered all parts of the dream
when he woke in the morning elated,
his consciousness fresh as a cool mountain stream
on which breezes and dragon-flies skated,
till everything that he so clearly recalled
disappeared like a flock of wild birds
whose nest is the hair of a man who's gone bald,
and he only remembered the words.
A poem can be like the froth on cold lager
whose residue leaves in the glass
the only remains of the poetic saga
that began with "It came once to pass."

Brad Leithauser writes about the Icelandic sagas which have been edited by Vidar Hreinsoson and published by Leifur Eiriksson in five voumes ("Golden Notebooks, " The New York Review, December 20,2001) . He writes that the verses have numerous little pleasures, as where a "prow's meadow" turns out to be the sea, "scabbard-icicles" words and "love-hair's island" a vagina". "Drink of the giant's kin" is poetry itself. He writes about Star-Oddi, "so skilled in calendar-calculation, " who steps out under the night sky after dreaming of having written a poem:

Oddi went out and observed the stars, which he had a habit of doing when they were visible. Then he thought of the dream and remembered everything in it except the poem that he seemed to have composed.

12/8/01

After melodrama comes the antic anecdote,
after tragedy the joke,
after death a destination via ferryboat,
classic or baroque.

Joyce Carol Oates writes in the NYT on December 31 about the phenomenon of "words fail us" that occurs after major events such as the events of 9/11 (Words Fail, Memory Blurs, Life Wins") :

As soon as such an experience-whether anecdotal or tragic-is over, we begin the inevitable process of "healing": that is, forgetting: we extract from the helpless, visceral sensation some measure of intellectual summary or control. We lie to ourselves: we revise experience to make it lighthearted and amusing to others. For in what other way is terror to be tamed, except recycled as anecdotes or aphorisms, a sugary coating to hide the bitter pellet of truth within?

12/31/01

A mouth pressed lightly on an angel's hand
is speech as once described by Robert Merrill,
which makes speech very hard to understand
by those who have forgotten, to their peril,
that angels constantly are trying to
communicate with us, not using speech,
but intuitions that we share. A few
point out the silent angels' point of view.

Inspired by a poem by Robert Merrill:
A Dedication

Hans, there are moments when the whole mind
Resolves into a pair of brimming eyes, or lips
Parting to drink from the deep spring of a death
That freshness they do not yet need to understand,
These are the moments, if ever, an angel steps
Into the mind, as kings into the dress
Of a poor goatherd, for their acts of charity.
There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed
Lightly and humbly against the angel's hand.

3/3/06