Poetry Magazine, Sheila Hellman, Holiday 2000-2001

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Sheila Hellman

USA

HalHellman@cs.com

    Leonia, NJ. December 8, 2000--Sheila A. Hellman, a well-known figure in the poetry world, died at age 72 on November 24. Her career--as dancer, teacher, presenter and poet--began with a fellowship in dance at New York University under Martha Hill and spanned a full 50 years. She also studied with Martha Graham, Sophie Maslow, Charles Weidman and others of that era.
    Performances included a very early TV special in 1949; a dance role at the Provincetown Playhouse (alongside Eva Marie Saint); and a stint with Fred Berk's folk dance group. She was also a founder of the long-running Story-Time Dance Theater (1959-1975), which performed in hundreds of schools as well as such theaters as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Town Hall.
    During her long teaching career, she began several important dance programs, including one in Harlem, one of the earliest at a public school. While there she created a syllabus for dance teachers in the New York City school system. Later, she toured the United States as a movement specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and for years was an active member of the National Dance Teachers Guild, which later became the American Dance Guild. She also served on a dance panel for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
    After developing a highly successful dance center at the YM-YWHA of North Jersey (now in Wayne) in the late 60s and early 70s, she became Cultural Arts Director at the Y in 1976. Though she presented programs of all kinds, dance remained an important part of her life, and she concentrated on emerging talent. One of her coups was booking Mark Morris for $500, before he became a household name.
During this time she also became deeply involved in the world of poetry, and used this medium to express her frustrations with her increasing inability to move as she did while younger. Her chapbook, "Positions", won the Perivale Press contest in 1992. A second chapbook, "Jerusalem", was published in 1994, and a third, "In the Outback: a Dreaming", was published by the March Street Press in 1999 (about a monthlong camping trip through the Australian Outback with her husband Hal).
    Over the years her poetry has also appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Ms Magazine, Poets On, Confrontation, Saturday Evening Post, Stone Country, Kansas Quarterly, Greenfield Review, Reconstructionist, and many other publications. Ms Hellman had poetry fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Arts, Karoly Foundation (France), Villa Montalvo, Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Mishkenot Sha'anim (Israel).
She also published essays on dance and theater in the New York Times, Boston Woman, New Jersey Arts magazine.

Five poems from
IN THE OUTBACK: A DREAMING

WHERE SOIL IS UNGENEROUS

Drawn by men who twirl sticks
to light a fire,
measure distance by singing,
I fly out of my western nest
into yesterday,
the hum of my body waiting.

The glare of Australia
makes some wish for the dark;
but slumbering below my surface
is a stretch of song,
a network of tracks
to my own dreaming

seduced by men, women
who live in a landscape
of scattered river beds,
who can perish in a day
following the melody of ancestors
that lingers on.

Swagmen carry all on their back
to walk this flat, dry continent,
sky dissolving into sand
in all directions.
Dinkum reasons
blokes find this place bonzer.

I dig for worms, tubers,
extract protein from the roots
of the Acacia bush, taste
the figs, cooked on hot stones
made into a cake;
look for Mimis
who live inside rocks,
lure people into their caves,
lock them up.

Reaching beyond comfort,
I pick up dried seeds,
the noisy rattles of my existence.

DIDGERADOO

Aboriginal instrument
of the Northern Territory

From its bottomless deep
the yelp of a dingo
pulsating gallop of a kangaroo.

Dead spirits rise, roused
by its guttural wail
accompanying dancers
in ceremonial dress.

I press clenched lips
where termites once feasted
in the center of this log,
breathe through my nose
forcing air to rush down
six feet
of hollow cylinder; puff
until the tendons in my neck
pop out, and swollen cheeks
register the colors of pain.

But I invite no haunting drone
of a desert owl,
no click of a kookaburra,
only the pitiful sound
of quivering before a journey,
ghosts snared
by the eerie vibrations
that turned termites
into stars of the Milky Way,
when man began to blow.

I carry the music with me,
a sadness of soul,
become the instrument
that summons insects to feed
on my wooden past,
hollow out room for tomorrow.

CEREMONY

In the outback of Australia,
a woman paints white circles
on the breasts of another,
her own mammaries hanging
like overripe pears --
nipple, a bull's-eye lowered.

I too have had circles
drawn around my breasts;
by men somber
as they painted gentian violet
in a steady hand
before they cut off my dreamings.

The fly buzzing
awakens to new company.
This is wilderness training,
I must learn how to use an axe
to survive,
cut away old supports.

I breathe by habit,
let my heart pump
disappointments away;
smell does not leave
its likeness behind.

Alone, my mind picks and shovels
at the past;
dried leaves curl up,
turn in on themselves.

Ghost gum trees hold their silence,
stand tall. I bend with wind,
feel the weight of terror
multiply like cells.

The scar stretches, a crest
over castles of bone;
dug out dungeons, pits -- a map
whose boundaries change
is a country erased.

Flat stitches hold in the ruins,
but the mind climbs hills
still attached to their curve.
Death sits on my shoulder
like a mockingbird.

EVERY WOMAN
IS A MEDICINE WOMAN

The Aboriginal woman makes soup
with the bones of belief;
eucalyptus leaves for flavor
as she stirs up old recipes
noting which trees to drink from

not to get pregnant, and how
to make breasts flow
from the smoke of konkerberries.
She can remove seeds from witchitty grubs,
to stop bleeding after birth, pick out

just the right amount of nicotine
to cleanse, purify,
the way my grandmother did
on the Lower East Side,
placing bonchus cups on my chest

to suck out the poison,
while my mother's chicken soup
as mysterious as ground up bark or twigs
always cured my runny nose
if it had the required kosher salt.

Friends place garlic around the neck
of a newborn, and on my daughter's crib
a red ribbon to keep out evil spirits.
Earth-rooted, we join hands, circle
like witches to treat night fevers,

sing a song of moaning,
afraid death will call
if we do not smear Vicks Vapo Rub
on our throat, or place dried berries
under a heavy wool blanket.

TO BE REBORN

Place the body
in the branches
of a tall tree.
Do not speak his name
sacred on this journey
of soul traveling
to the spirit world;
a passing marked
by garments burned,
legs broken not to wander.

Change all names
that are similar, reminders
of a parting filled with pain,
of a wife in cap of clay,
who will not talk
perhaps for years,
using signs,

until the sorrow
leaves her body,
sometimes eased
by a thunderstorm,
or cloudburst
that will send him
more swiftly
to the other world.