‘I Speak of Simple Things’

On Feb. 28, 2005, a man who sought to kill Judge Joan Lefkow instead murdered her husband, Michael Lefkow, 64, and her mother, Donna G. Humphrey, 89. In a tribute to her mother's life, Lefkow and her sister, Judith Smith, have published a collection of Humphrey's poems in a book called “I Speak of Simple Things.” You can read the introduction to the book written by Lefkow and Smith, as well as one of Humphrey's poems, below:

Introduction
By Joan Humphrey Lefkow  and Judith Humphrey Smith

Donna Grace Glenn Humphrey was born in Nemaha County, Kansas, on August 25, 1915, the fourth child of Coloma Jane Record and Hugh Ashley Glenn …

Donna and Otis L. “Jake” Humphrey, the son of Kentucky emigrants to Woodlawn, were married October 6, 1933. During the Great Depression, they moved with their young son, John, to Denver in pursuit of work but failing to get a foothold, they returned within a couple of years to farm 480 acres near Woodlawn. John recalls that they bought a 1933 Plymouth coupe with a rumble seat for the return trip …

Actualizing a dream of having money to call her own, Donna got her first job in an office after composing a letter of application so exceptional that her employer selected her over women with office experience …

Donna suffered from chronic depression, bearing feelings she identified as “losses, humiliations, longings unfulfilled, unnamable yearnings, and most of all, that hideous, nearly unbearable knowledge of failure.”  Under such clouds, her young married children announced each pregnancy knowing that it would not necessarily be good news to her. She dwelt on the emotional pain of her past which must have equaled the terrible pain and humiliation she endured as a result of genetic malformation of her feet. Without treatments widely available now, she groped through her darkness by reading her Bible and praying to a God by whom she often felt abandoned.

Donna died a horrifying death on February 28, 2005, at the age of 89 while visiting with her daughter Joan and family in Chicago. The event was widely covered by the media and will not be dignified by description in these pages. Because she was an aged woman, the loss of Donna was eclipsed by the death at the same time of her son-in-law, Michael Lefkow, and the outpouring of sympathy to his wife and young daughters. A few friends who knew of Donna's poetry, however, asked at that time to receive a copy of her work. These requests were the seed planted in our minds and hearts that led us to publish this collection of the poems we discovered as we sifted through her things that winter and the following spring.

Those who knew her well knew she had a keen sense of humor, distaste for falsity, and uncommon intelligence. In publishing her poems we present our mother as she was, “all wool and yard wide,” as she liked to say. Would she have approved of making this collection public?  We are confident she would have, even though a few reveal secrets she did not share outside her intimate circle. To hold these back would have distorted the truth of her life.

Primarily, it is a gift to our children and our children's children, to the end of Donna's line, so that they may know this grandmother, who was an extraordinary woman.

— Joan Humphrey Lefkow  and Judith Humphrey Smith

If I Were a Poet
By Donna G. Humphrey

If I were a poet
I would speak my thoughts in language
All sublime and terrible. Perhaps
My words would span my generation:
Children, yet unborn, might strive
To plumb their meaning.
But I, I only know of simple things:
Heart-stabbing winter sunsets,
The unexpected thrust of pain
That tells me life is fragile,
That moments such as this
In which the western sky pours glory
On a snowy cornfield are significant.
I speak of ordinary things: of wind-swept fields,
Of bright May mornings when my wash is hung
To dry in breezes sweetened by the apple blossoms
On the tree my father planted.
My thoughts are not profound:
I only speak of simple things.

To learn more about "I Speak of Simple Things," visit ampersandworks.com.

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