by Janice Konstantinidis (guest author) on 15 November, 2011
Janice Konstantinidis was an inmate in Mount Saint Canice, Sandy Bay, Tasmania, where she worked as an unpaid child labourer in the Good Shepherd Sisters’ commercial laundry. Janice now lives in California in USA. Here, she shares one of her recent poems.
Images of Janice’s beautiful garden accompanied by the following quotation is included in the exhibtion Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions.
Janice says:
I love my garden. It is a source of great pleasure and an outlet for creativity. I have always trusted the seasons, perhaps more so than people. Seasons are reliable, a sense of the constant in a chaotic world for me. My world is not so chaotic now-days.
Summer’s Cloud.
Summer went away today, I saw it on a cloud.
First the sun, and then a mist,
across the sky, a shroud.
I thought I should be sorry.
But then, I thought, so what’s so bad,
the winter brings such life,
steamy fields, from freezes
that stir the bulbs to show
their tips of green,
a welcome sight.
As seasons change the guard,
a festival explodes.
Fallen leaves and tiny tips,
that tell me all is well.
Colors red and yellow,
to fallen acorns show,
that there is sense
in all I see, and even what I smell.
Crisp leaves crunch beneath my feet
making me feel well
Pleased by thoughts of
cozy nights of fireside
knitting, watching sleeping
Surely this has charm.
Janice Konstantinidis
November 3 2011
Thank you, Janice for sharing this with us. I’ve read your story and I know how hard you’ve worked to overcome the horrors. I’m glad that winter turns to spring for you now.
Thank you Anne. I am happy to say that winter’s turn to spring for me now. It has been a long haul. I am grateful for my time here in the USA; it has been very healing. I love the interaction with like minded people.
Janice.