Helen is a Facebook friend, a kind soul and a devout Catholic. All of these descriptors come through in her poetry. Although the book is dedicated to a priest and refers often to specifics of her religion, it also shows a general love and kindness toward humanity.
She quotes T.S. Elliot in the front of her book (as well as two Saints and the Bible).
...Be at peace with your thoughts and visions. ... your share of the eternal burden,
The perpetual glory. This is one moment, But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy ....
~T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
From her new book, A Flower More Enduring,
published by Main Street Rag.
In the “good old days”
Daddy slid down the pole
with three-year-old me in his arms,
bought Juicy Fruit gum
from the firehouse machine.
Neither Daddy nor Mummy
spoke of the retrieval of bodies,
dumped down a flooded mineshaft
not far from our house. Skinny firemen—
such as Daddy—were lowered
to retrieve the family’s bodies. Five people
and their dog, three bound & gagged,
kidnapped & murdered by Billy “hard luck” Cook.
After that, Daddy left Joplin Fire Department.
Age 5: Jimmy’s Koffee Kup Kafe—
kitty-corner to our house—I licked single scoop
ice cream—vanilla in flat-bottom cone.
Daddy drank coffee. On the way home, he chatted
with the only Black motorcycle cop I’d ever seen.
I’d never heard the word “lynched,”
didn’t know Blacks had been driven from town—
cattle-packed onto north-bound trains—shipped to KC
or St. Louis. In grade school, one classmate had
a Black grandmother.
At North Junior High, I made new friends,
acquaintances. Carol remains my best friend forever.
Terry, lone Black student. Was he popular
for who he was or only for bringing
athletic talent to the Norsemen?
Even in high school, I never wondered
why Joplin had so few Black people,
why Black kids huddled between classes, laughing together.
I lived the life of a white child in the “good old days”:
my yoke light, moon-glittered:
a world beneath contented stars, hadn’t read
White Man’s Heaven, didn’t know Blacks lived
hell that shouldn’t exist on God’s earth.
I enter the hospital after visiting hours
through a side door, wind the halls
to NICU. Hope rides radiator currents
in the waiting room. The child
clings to her life.
Lights blink. Yards of tubes
connect whirring machines for 42 days.
Frost dusts the ground with silver. Hope
bursts, a bubble on a thorn. A pink
teddy bear rests on a granite tombstone.
