Cigarettes, Jerusalem, October 2000

H.D. photo of field in India, date unknown.

426.

Unpublished poem by Lurene Helzer, October 21, 2002, “Cigarettes, 1, Jerusalem, October, 2000.” I must have written this about someone I met in Jerusalem as I was thinking about my own struggles to quit smoking. I had quit, restarted, quit for good a year later. Outside that, I am not sure what prompted the writing of this dismal poem:

I saw bones. Bones of the near future.

She would never lie, all crushed innocence, in a mass grave in Europe. She would not disintegrate against the awful force of an explosion at high noon. She would not suffer….she wrote her meaning in white chalk, in white smoke…