This Made Me Cry.

(The poet in this story, Donna Humphrey, was the mother of federal judge Joan Lefkow. Lefkow's husband and her mother were killed by a man whose suit had been decided unfavorably by Lefkow.

If you're not familiar with the story, here are some articles about the Lefkow murders... one two three four.

It's a very sad story to begin with. And to me, a repressed ex-poet myself, this article makes it unspeakably sadder.)

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Poetry tells story of judge's mother
Mary Schmich (mschmich@tribune.com)
July 29, 2007

Donna Humphrey loved her desk. With its broad top, wooden drawers and inlaid leather writing pad, it made her, a woman who had never gone to high school, feel she really was a poet.

Not many people thought of Humphrey as a writer during her single moment of renown, however, or even fully registered her name. On the day she died so brutally, in February 2005, she was just Judge Joan Lefkow's mother.

Humphrey was 89 at the time, and she appeared almost as a footnote in the media accounts of the man who broke into Lefkow's Chicago home, shot the federal judge's husband and mother to death and left the bodies in the basement for the judge to find.

The photos that appeared of Humphrey after her murder—a gray-haired woman who, like so many older women, would be easy to overlook—gave no clue to the complex life she had recorded in her poems.

In her last phase of life, Humphrey had lived alone in a suburban Denver townhouse. Clearing it out after her funeral, in the den that contained her beloved desk, her children found her lifetime of writing.

Poems lay in boxes, folders, desk drawers. There were poems written in the 1940s and ones written much later, like one called "Widows." It starts like this:

We are everywhere
We with our little perms
Our little purses,
Our careful steps
Supported by our walkers
Or our canes.
We are the survivors.
Years ago we laid our men away
And though
We did not know it then
Our own significance
As well.

Growing up, Humphrey's children knew she wrote poems, though they never saw her writing. She had no desk on their Kansas farm. Lefkow guesses she composed poems in her mind at the ironing board or with pen and paper on the dining table after the kids went to sleep.

A few were even published in small journals. Once she won a gold watch for writing a jingle for Perfex detergent.

"That was such a thrill for a farm woman," Lefkow says, "a Bulova watch arriving in the mail."

After Humphrey's death, when some of her friends from church asked for copies of her poems, Lefkow and her sister Judy Smith began to think about publishing a few privately.

But for a long time, Lefkow couldn't even read the poems.

"I felt looking at them would be so painful," she says.

She was afraid she would confront not just reminders of her mother's awful death but also of her hard life.

Humphrey had spent much of her life depressed, regretting paths not taken and opportunities denied, finding solace in little but her poetry and her conservative Christianity.

Here's a poem about selling the family farm where she'd grown up, next to the land where she reared her own children:

Goodbye, old home, old farm,
Goodbye to elm trees, wind-battered, brave,
Cloaking nakedness each Spring
With gallant greenery. Your branches held
our swings
And sheltered shyest dreams doomed to
impossibility.

Those shy, doomed dreams kept young Donna company on the lonely farm, where as a girl she spent her days making beds, mopping floors, scrubbing clothes and hanging them to dry.

She was the fourth of six children, among them Willis, her bedridden brother, dead by age 11. She remembered him in a poem:

. . . how tired he was of being sick. He told
Of days when he, too sick to play, would sleep,
And of a dream he had of playgrounds

Like any girl, Donna wanted to be pretty, and so she wept when she was forced to wear black, high-top corrective boots for the weak ankles that afflicted her until the day she died. She wept again when her father told her she was needed on the farm and couldn't go to high school.

College was one of Humphrey's shy, doomed dreams. She wanted to be a teacher. She was happiest when she was reading. Books, magazines, newspapers—she read everything her grandmother, another self-educated farm woman, brought into the house.

When her grandmother discovered a correspondence school in a magazine ad, the two of them went to high school together, by mail.

In that way, young Donna learned to write.

And, finally, more than a year after her death, her daughter Joan was able to read her poetry.

"I got through some other things I was struggling with in terms of closing out the two lives that were lost," Lefkow says.

She found poems written in a plain, lyrical style. They told stories. They mused on age and God and children.

In one Humphrey writes wistfully of a youthful romance while she was married; in another of an abortion in midlife.

With raw truth, her poems evoke a woman's life in a place and time that was hard for everyone, especially sensitive, ambitious women.

"But they weren't as dark as I expected," Lefkow says. "A lot of it was sweet, so humane and powerful in some fundamental way. That was reassuring to me, that there was joy in her life."

There wasn't a lot of joy, but there was this about the freedom young Donna felt riding a horse named Bill:

….girl and horse
Beyond the sight of elders, streaked through
pastures,
Jumping ditches, risking life and bones
At breakneck speed and then, sedately,
home again,
Bringing the cows for milking.

Last year, Lefkow met Suzanne Isaacs, who runs Ampersand Inc., a private publishing firm in Chicago. Isaacs offered to help publish her mother's poems.

So in September, 500 copies of Donna Humphrey's poems will be in print. Many will go to friends and relations, but some will be for sale.

It's Lefkow's way of saying "thank you" to her mother, and "I'm sorry."

"It's a way of remembering her, assuring that her descendants remember her and know that she was a person of value, a woman of value."

It's the reward Donna Humphrey couldn't imagine in 1959 when she wrote "Frustration."

I long to be a poet; and once, I thought I would
I'd write of Life and Love and such
As no one else quite could.
And so I wrote my patient lines
I bared my secret soul
Poured out my heart in anguished words
Sure that I'd meet my goal
Of published works and public praise
But now, at long, sad last
I know the truth; it shall not be
No words of mine shall cast
Their deathless spell on future minds
In this or distant lands.

(link to original article)
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