Helen Tells a Story: The Bollinger Baby, Chicago, 1915

The infant,
face coiled like an enraged snake,
never knew its agony.

I did.
Annie fingerspelled the baby's story
into my saddened hands.

The Bollinger baby,
the doctor said, was an imbecile,
with the brain of a carrot or celery stick.
Why, he asked, save a death-in-life,
allow imbecilic seed to breed?

Deaf and blind
at 18 months, I grunted like a pig and hissed like a cat.
But, my brain was no celery stick.  I foraged my father's
pockets for gum drops, buried my head in our dog's neck.

At age 7, I named my dolls Mudpie and Mamma Bear,
and kissed my mother.  When Annie, the magician,
pulled language out of her hat, I told my story.

Yet, no hat trick lifted the Bollinger baby
out of its fog.  The infant never told its story.
[from Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems. (Pudding House)]


Correspondence to a Deaf-Blind Poet: December 1938

One bite of moldy bread,
a torn sleeve from my silk dress,
soiled by rat turds,
The Institute for the Blind
trained me for verse, not
begging, you write from Vienna.

To Hitler, Jews are like roaches,
the blind and deaf are dumb
vermin, you say in Greek,
hoping the censors are dim.

In my Connecticut home,
in my chair by the fire
as I write Christmas cards
and smell the pines,
fear storms across your land,
squelches all speech,
takes your breath away.

People from presidents
to paper-boys
tell me I'm a God-send.
Yet, I can do so little.

If only I could lift
you out of the shadows
on the shoulders of my fame.
But, America wants no foreign
defectives on its shores.

No Yuletide this year,
only shadows.
[from Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems. (Pudding House)]


Creed

I believe in daisy-pranked fields
where my teacher told me Arabian
Nights tales about peacocks, poppy
seeds and goldfish in the river.
I believe in dreams, though I won't
tell mine, if you won't tell yours
at breakfast.  Our slumber
world, even if the gods drop by,
is boring before coffee.  I believe
scientists, armed with their facts,
keep us on the straight and narrow,
though the road to hell is paved
with literalism.  I believe in smell:
tobacco, my dog's fur when
when he emerges shaking from his bath,
the sausage the cabbie eats
when he stops for a light.

Hell is the smell of the sweatshop
I visited last winter in the Bronx.
A dwarfed boy tended his sister,
while his mother sewed, hunched
over a clamoring machine.  I believe
in God.  He loves us all, but is no fool.
The heavenly city isn't a stupid pearl
and sapphire affair.  It's a down-to-earth
town.  Dogs bark, peasants sing

folk songs, kids play stickball.
Wrong-doers browbeat themselves.
Every gang of crooks strives to outwit
the rest, and misers hug their money
bags to their hearts.  I believe
the Bible is the great poem of the world.
[from Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems. Pudding House)]


Hershey Bars and Pin-Up Girls

Hey, I'm Jimmy,
Forrest Gump for real.
I don't go around saying,
life's a box of chocolates.
I bet my Ma wasn't sweet
like Sally Field.
I've never seen Ma.
I dunno if she ever
went to the movies,
or if she had freckles
and red hair like me.
I never met Ma or Pa.

The State School
for the Feeble Minded
was all I had for folks.
They called me
imbecile 
idiot
mentally defective
an accident of nature
dumber
than the dumbest ass.

They fed me
soggy oatmeal
and grizzled meat
that dogs wouldn't eat.
We had to eat soap
if we even touched a book.

One day, a doctor
with cold hands,
tried to give me
a needle filled
with green water.
It smelled like pee.
I told the doc
I'd punch his face
if he didn't put
that thing away.
It's only science,
he said, you'd
make such a good
experimental subject.

Don't you dare
even touch a girl's hand,
the State folks said,
Your kind's got no
business even being out
where normal people
can see your imbecilic face.

A dumb hound
won't know to come in
when it rains, they hissed,
you can't even tell
when the rain starts to fall.

I wasn't that slow,
I didn't know much
about Hitler or Japan.
But, when I heard
about Pearl Harbor,
I put on my ripped
sneakers, grabbed
the quarter I'd found
in the janitor's closet,
and ran to war!

Other grunts bitched
about the K-rations,
cold and never-ending
gunfire. In the middle
of the night, they wept
for their girls at home.
Not me.

My foxhole
was my home.
Hershey bars,
pin-up girls
and a Purple Heart --
my just desserts.
I always knew when
the rain would fall.
[from The War Work poems]