Lilla sold a paper, The Morning Star
Communist street sentinel standing guard
Boldly bayonetting startled passers-by
With a firm bloodless prod, no battle cry
Red-top thrust into capitalist guts
Her Quaker roots forbade making a fuss
As the headlines raged
Lilla’s silence concussed

Silver-haired helmet, skirt of sheet steel
Iron grey eyes, forged in The Great War
Witnessed foul, black-bellied Zeppelins
Looming Over London, Leviathan
Bowels bloated with devilish bombs
Later she joined the socialist fight
To Lilla, the blackouts blinded us
Iron Curtains kept out the Red light

Lilla quietly sold The Morning Star
But her comet’s cry didn’t sickle the sky
It fell flat, like a hammer in thick mud
Failed to rouse, sculpt the masses, I was one
Yet still she tried waking us, reaching out
With her cold ideas came a warm hand
She fed, homed the helpless, when times were hard
Helping strays like Mum and I, reaching out…

An Art teacher, in sharp black ink she drew
Pox-free peasants playing tabors, lutes
Hurdy-gurdying in the agrarian sun
Long-toed shoes and cowls, benign, bucolic
Innocent of Marx’s icy dialectic
Craving respect, I showed her my teen prose
But she dissected my angst and with her
Better-red-than-dead pen, exposed my pose

Then, in the evening of her many days
Too old to still stand apart on cold streets
Spreading class dissent with paper and ink
At 90, unbidden, a rebel barely heard
She rose and spoke at my Mum’s funeral
Grey eyes streaming, proud tears on oaken cheeks
“A Nurse. Dead at 59. Worked to the bone.” Her words
“A carer, for whom few cared. Shame! Poor girl!”

Hesperus is Phosphorus. A mere puzzle
Two words, two meanings, only one stellar thing*
Lilla knew, she understood the solution
All her life preparing for revolution
But only then, with the setting of her star
Did I feel the force of her human mission
From the heart it came, from Venus, from Lilla
The Morning Star, was for once, just a whisper…

By Mark Ramey

*Linguistic philosophy gets itself in a tangle with the statement, “Hesperus is Phosphorus.” These are the Greek names for the Morning and Evening Star. The puzzle arises because both names have the same referent, they are both Venus, but they have different senses. Venus is the Roman god of Love.