Gregory Gordon began writing poetry as a young boy while struggling with a violent and alcoholic father. A pale, skinny, and sensitive young man, Gordon found it helped him cope with the loneliness and scars, on body and soul, by filling the blank pages of his schoolboy notebooks.
“You can try to conceal the truth on the pages, but they began to shrink until all the hiding places evaporated,” he told me in an intimate conversation.
The hurt from his abusive father led to anger and loneliness and he ended up joining the wrong crowd. “I became alienated from myself. As though I was cut off from myself and had no feelings. The empty notebook pages were the only place I could be honest with myself, vulnerable.”
His first poem called Transformation about the necessity of acknowledging our own depravity before real change occurs was published in Yediot Aharonot, one of Israel’s longest standing and popular Hebrew dailies.
The Passage
Beyond the oceans
you reach the sea
your only light the solitary distant...
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