I first read Helen Degen Cohen's poems about her experiences and her parents' experiences during and after the Holocaust in the early 90s. At the time, I was writing about my parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps in Germany, and I found in Helen's poetry a voice that seemed to understand and speak of a world with a depth and complexity and compassion that I wished I could echo.

Helen wrote about her experiences as a child during the war. She was in the Lida Ghetto in Belorus, then in hiding with her parents in the town's little prison (where her father, a barber and jack-of-all-trades, created a flood only he could fix, in order to show the Gestapo how indispensable he was). Later, separated from her parents, she was in hiding again in a cabin surrounded by the farm fields she grew to love and the flowers that grew alongside them. The flowers were like habry, cornflowers. While she was in hiding, her parents were with the partisns in the resistance, as described in the new movie <span style="font-style:italic;">Defiance</span>.

 I searched out her writing in little magazines like Spoon River Poetry Review and The Wire and anthologies like Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Concert at Chopin's House: A Collection of Polish-American Writing. 

Her fiction and essays blew me away, but I found myself especially drawn to the voice in her poems. I re-read them and thought about them and wrote a scholarly article about them.

When I heard that Helen was finally gathering these poems together and publishing them along with more recent poems about her experiences, I looked forward to her book more than I can remember looking forward to any other book of poems.

That book Habry was everything I had hoped it to be.

Here are some of Helen's poems from the new collection:


I remember coming into Warsaw, a child


out of a sheer, sunlit countryside,
where sometimes a goat made the only sound in
all the universe, and a car engine would certainly
tear the wing of an angel. Entering burnt Warsaw
and the Sound of the World, how strange, how lonely
the separate notes of Everything, lost in a smell of
spent shots still smoking, a ghost of bombs, a silence
of so many voices, the ruined city singing not only
a post-war song but an Everything hymn of dogs wailing,
a car, a horse, a droning plane, a slow, distant
demolition, hammers like rain, the hum, the hum,
bells and levers and voices leveled and absorbed
into the infinite hum in which the ruins
sat empty and low like well-behaved children,
the ruins, their holes, like eyes, secretly open,
passing on either side, as we entered Warsaw, an air
of lost worlds in a smoky sweet light ghosting
and willing their sounding and resounding remains



Habry


Habry, peaceful Polish flowers,
Mine, yet I never belonged to that country.
Fraying, breezing in the quietest quiet,
Blue, all along the edge of the wheatfield,
Silken blue, among orange poppies,
And the sun is silent, silent as the night.

How can so much sunlight sink so quietly?
How can it be that no one is here?
I, after all, have never left that countryside
And not even the Poles are visible, and where
Are the girls who forever wove garlands
And ran through flowers as if they were air?

I return to habry as if by candlelight,
Warmed, though I know they are nowhere near,
There is nothing like them in poor Illinois,
No Jews-and-gentiles, nothing to separate
Petal from petal – only hushed blue
Habry, hovering in the air.

(habry, or chabry – cornflowers)



I have been lost in an image forest



so deep that even owls
sit dazed by the moon, whose evidence
streaks across like animal light
in a long, low, illuminating cry –
a forest spilled in the moon's eye
a lost-and-found where the evident is curable.
And my private pathways glisten
and wind, and wind and glisten.
Pathways, a web of silver, I know each
as well as this hour of night
when ghosts become as touchable as
those who have never been lost are not.

_____________________

Helen Degen Cohen's book Habry is available from Puddin'head Press and Amazon.

I've also posted a blog about her earlier book On a Good Day One Discovers a Poet at the blog Writing the Polish Diaspora. Helen's memoir about returning to Warsaw to find the Polish woman who helped save her appears at The Scream on Line along with a number of her poems and a short story based on her childhood experiences, "The Edge of the Field."