gershon hepner - youth comes again

Youth Comes Again



Teaching that for everything
there’s a season and a time
Qoheleth, the great Preacher-King
inspired this short verse in rhyme.

We who squander sorrows
anticipating joys
of nebulous tomorrows
the gods of grief annoy.
We regard most sadly
misfortune’s rhyme and reason,
bringing strength till madly
youth comes again in season.


Inspired by Rilke’s Tenth Elegy, translated by the wife of Andrew Solomon, whose book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” (Scribner) Rosemary Dinnage reviews in The New York Review of Books, October 4,2001:


We, who squander our sorrows,
How we look beyond them into
the mournful passage of time
to see whether they might end.

But they are seasons of us, yes, our winter-
Abiding leafage, meadows,
ponds, landscapes we are born into,
inhabited by birds and creatures in the reeds.


9/30/01

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/youth-comes-again/