Helen Keller’s Long Lost Child

She sits beyond the copse of trees
One arm slung over the back of a park bench,
Dyed red hair swimming in the breeze,
Her jacket embroidered with one word – wench.

Her paralyzed legs are placed atop
The wheelchair right in front of her.
Clad in denim, she chooses hip hop
On her iPod, dancing for

The seventy year old man on a cane walking his beagle
Two kids in hoodies skateboarding by
A mother pushing her twins in a double carriage
A cop standing watching a pigeon die.

“Is that yours?” the old man asks
The girl on the park bench, pity in his voice,
Pointing at her wheelchair.
Music blaring in her ears
She ignores his words.
Closing her eyes
She refuses to look at his expression of tragic woe
Or answer.

“Are you deaf? Are you blind?” he shouts.
The beagle pulls at him,
Causing him to stumble and curse
But not at the dog.
His wife has died the week before.
The loneliness is eating him alive.
He thought for sure
This girl would answer him
Perhaps even understand.
Instead he is ignored
The final straw.

He collapses to the ground, weeping
As the beagle licks his tears.
The girl looks over and pulls an earbud out
Listening, now, to the beat of his anguished cries.
She turns the iPod off and pats the bench next to her.
“Sit by me,” she says.

He shakes his head
Saying “I’m sorry, so sorry”.
Painfully he rises to his feet
Takes a seat
Next to her.
He no longer cries but cannot see through his tears.
He is too proud to wipe his eyes
Or too weary.

They listen to the sudden silence
Watching as the cop scoops up the dead pigeon
Into a small bag.
“My wife,” he says “is also dead.”
“I’m sorry,” the girl replies.
She lays a hand on his gnarled one.
His body shudders, human touch already a foreign thing
And it’s only been a week.
The beagle, sighing, lies down at his feet.

“Alone we can do so little,
together we can do so much”
The girl says. “Helen Keller. She said that.
She was deaf and blind.”
She puts the earbud back in and
Turns on her iPod.

They sit beyond the copse of trees
An old man, a girl and a beagle
As the cop walks by holding
The small bag.

Copyright 2007 Ruth Harrigan