From Blog to Blook

I've been planning to try to create a hardcopy version of the Helen blog. I think reading back over our journey will be easier and more user friendly that way - and also saves the story in case something changes with blogger and it vanishes forever. One barrier to actually making this idea a reality though has been the elusive sixth poem. I know there were six poems chosen from Helen's work and read at the funeral - but I cannot remember the sixth. Pretty much the day after the funeral I collapsed with exhaustion and emotion in equal parts and thus abandoned the blog all of a sudden. Whenever I have gone back to it thinking that now it is time to finish and make it into a photo book I have been blocked by the gap left by that poem. I've checked in with Kaye, Louis, Douglas and Dave but none of us know...so it seems it will have to remain a mystery.

Poems from the funeral 5/6

The Difference


My hair's gone wild for the weekend -
A good thing, too.
Glad it can tell the difference,
Sometimes the rest of me can't. >

Poems from the funeral 4/6

Of Hearts and Sleeves and Keys and Things


We didn't wear lockets
of hair or tiny pictures
or gold bracelets
with heart-shaped padlocks
in my family or signet rings
or bluebirds of happiness
or even charm bracelets.


Were they wanton
in some unmentionable way
precursor to wearing your heart
on your sleeve
or maybe idolatrous
like those pretty statues
and plastic shrines
in the mysterious windows
of Pellegrini's
or heathen hocus-pocus things
or merely worldly?


Maybe that's why
though I treasure yours
I don't offer you my door-key?

Poems from the funeral 3/6

Death of a Cat
I've buried a tawny frogmouth, Mum,
a bush-pigeon and an echidna
I'll find a special tree
for Ms Puss


Ms Puss
who'd kept herself aloof
except for him
the little boy meantime grown man
Ms Puss, once Mrs whose name
he'd changed at the vet's -
after her operation, Mum -
Ms Puss they carried on a board
from the road
after the children heard her cry

Poems from the funeral 2/6

The Makings

The fright of a
Fuck!
or
Jesus!
screamed
into my mothering ear!

The words themselves
additional to the fact
of teenage anger
accessories to the fact
bring their own
particular pain,
spikes on the mallet
that beats my head.

Later, she admonishes
my tears of shock,
and shame, bourgeois fear:
'I didn't tell you to
Fuck off!"
Will I learn
the fine gradations?
Do I ever want to?
Must I?
Or will it soon be over?

I have become a prude for her
as my mother before me for me.

Poems from the Funeral 1/6

Who’s Turning the Kaleidoscope? Kaleidoscopic fragments of your war-time years spin through my mind: starting Medicine at the Sorbonne, black-marketed nylons and cigarettes, Mercedes hidden in haystacks, people hidden in haystacks poked by bayonets, men in a boat, you amongst them, betrayed by a girl one of them slept with – one of you, I should perhaps say, though I never have till now… The mouth of a cave blackened by gun-powder - yours or your enemy’s? Someone’s ambush. Having to dig a trench – or was it a pit? then line up, all of you, along the edge, machine-guns at your backs: shrapnel in your legs saw you fall with the others, but the miracle was you did not suffocate before the guerrillas found you and one other out of all that lot. Someone has pointed out that you don’t get shrapnel from machine-guns. That’s right, I realise. Don’t know any more if it’s your kaleidoscope or mine that has mingled the fragments, but I do remember those unusual scars on your shins. I remember that word and I have watched your tormented sleep. The camps, you being nick-named Ghandhi after release – so thin from typhoid. You a translator, relied on for your eight languages, able to get privileges – was this the time of nylons, cigarettes and Mercedes? You hungry and unemployed in Paris. No benefits to refuse in the France of ’45. For the Stateless Person: No job without a permit to stay, (I have your Permis de Sejour still) No permit to stay without a job. You spent all day in one queue, next day in the other, you told me. Queue-jumping, meaning refusal to queue, has become a catchword of blame in Australian politics, you might be interested to know, though many of the countries to which it is applied have no queues for people to join. In one of the camps, a woman and child, a little boy you’d later adopt, a beautiful woman you’d later marry. He stuck with you because you stuck with him when she did not. And now he is our family, though you are gone. A child’s satin-covered missal from his first communion holds your joint naturalisation papers: talismans of your new life. He leaves it in my care. Trusts me with that and other things. On his rare trips north, he used to arrive sometimes unannounced, but we came to know who would be sleeping in any van with the dashboard smothered in fallen blooms. Stone-mason sings: At the end of all this, I’ll scoop up frangipanni – handfuls, armfuls, facefuls of fragrant white and gold, cool suede, rich and fresh. In my bed I’ll roll in it, crush its beauty for my own like a cat in catnip.

A link to a booklet about the funeral and the wake

Douglas put together a digital booklet with a few photographs - if you copy and paste this link into your browser you should see a pdf version you can download and print if you so desire: http://www.dugfish.com/Helen.pdf