GAS Featured Poet: Helen Losse

 

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.

A former English teacher, Helen Losse, who lives in Winston-Salem, NC, is the author of ten poetry collections. Her poems have been anthologized and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist.  She is Poetry Editor Emeritus of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and a former Associate Editor for Kentucky Review.  A Flower More Enduring contains her most vulnerable writing.  Hickory poet Tim Peeler calls it her “best book” with “memorable imagery.” Not entirely autobiographical, the poems seek truth concerning her conversion from Protestant Christianity to the Catholic Church.