perpetual loss

PERPETUAL LOSS


Being Jewish means to sense
perpetually the loss
of a utopia in past tense
that, like an albatross,
hangs round Jews’ necks like dreams
of future futile gains,
imaginary as the schemes
to break all present chains.

Inspired by a line in the play “Photograph 51” by Anna Ziegler, currently showing at the Fountain Theater in LA, starring Aria Alpert as Rosalind Franklin, who at King’s College, London was the first person to demonstrate by means of Xray crystallography the double helix structure of DNA, inspiring the paper of James Watson and Francis Crick that on them the Nobel Prize together with Maurice Wilkins, Franklin’s colleague. Franklin has a Jewish friend, Caspar, who works at Yale and in the play declares: “Being Jewish means perpetual loss.”

© 2009 Gershon Hepner 3/27/09