With just over an hour to go before the summer's big poetry slam, all is not going according to plan.
Rain pours, which is good because the temperature is falling, but it's still sweltering inside the century-old church in Southwest Baltimore's Pigtown, where the poetry camp operates without air conditioning. Some kids went home early because of the heat, or didn't come at all. Others are across the street at a library party.
Those remaining are playing Legos or Disney Monopoly, or they're sprawled out on chairs and tables sleeping. Visitors from the nonprofits that fund the camp have left.
At 3 o'clock, Helen Keith goes to the library, rounds up her charges, and files everybody into the "Hall of Fame," a room where the walls are covered with children's portraits and poetry. For one last time this summer, she wants the kids to get their feelings out.
Keith, 43, runs Promoting Children's Voices, a youth poetry project that has been her labor of love for the past decade. Participants get lots of practice reading and writing, and Keith brings college students in to tutor them when those skills are lacking. But she also wants to give the children the tools to express their emotions, to use poetry as a vehicle for relieving what can at times feel like overwhelming stress growing up in the inner city.
On a microphone filled with static, she reads aloud to the 25 children the Langston Hughes poem "Mother to Son," in which a mother speaks to her son about her life's struggles. (Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.) Then, she tells them, they are to write in their journals 10 lines about struggles of their own.
An 11-year-old girl writes in lavender marker.
My struggle is the pain I went through when my brother died. I had to go through that pain for a month it might not mean that much to you but ti mean every thing to me
Her brother died July 10 of kidney failure. He was 18. This is her first week back at camp.
A 12-year-old boy writes in pencil.
My struggle/ Living life with killing/ Not knowing if you're gonna get robbed/ Not knowing if youre gonna live to the next day or if you gonna die/ Life isn't fair most of us know it
It's just what Keith was looking for.
Sometimes, the children's poems are hilarious. One laminated in the Hall of Fame is about flatulence.
Often, though, heartbreak isn't far beneath the surface. During her after-school and summer programs, Keith - a mother of three - gets a lot of poetry about self-hatred. When that happens, she tells the children to find something beautiful about themselves and write it down.
Poetry has been Keith's release from the time she was a child. Her only formal training was from Mr. Dorsey, her sixth-grade teacher at Belmont Elementary School in the 1970s. "Don't cry about it," Mr. Dorsey would say. "Write about it."
She did, about her longing for love, about her frustration that her mother was so strict. A self-professed drama queen, she'd often write letters to vent and leave them on her mother's bed. But she was pregnant by the time she graduated from Walbrook High School, and though she loved to write, she never considered it a viable career option. So at Coppin State University, she pursued her other passion: early childhood education.
She worked at a series of preschools before opening a day care business in her home. Kids started coming by the house and confiding in her. Like Mr. Dorsey, she told them to write.
They did, sprawled out all over her house, and when there were too many of them to fit, officials from the church down the block - St. Paul the Apostle - gave her space to rent.
That was eight years ago, and Keith has been teaching kids how to write poetry ever since. She and Darrin Keith, her husband of 21 years, have dug deep into their own pockets to keep her program afloat without charging the children. To participate in the camp, which includes roller-skating and basketball as well as trips to museums, kids need only to enroll in the public library's summer reading program.
Keith wasn't paid until late last year, when she was selected as one of eight Open Society Institute fellows. The $48,750 she's receiving over 18 months has contributed to buying the children journals, folders, pens and pencils. She has also had financial support the past two years from the nonprofit Tri-Churches Housing, which has covered the cost of supplies, field trips, kerosene heaters and a new floor for the Hall of Fame.
"The fellowship didn't buy me a new car," Keith said. (She and her husband share a 1994 Pontiac Transport SE with a broken window.) "The fellowship didn't move me out of the inner city. It provided stability for the youth."
For the past two years, the church has waived Keith's rent, but it closed as a congregation in March and plans to sell the building by the end of the year. Now, Keith is desperately seeking a new place to operate.
She and her family moved out of Pigtown last year after a young man was fatally shot outside their Washington Boulevard home. (Her youngest child, 8-year-old Maya, wrote a poem: I like my community/ But when I wakeup/ Someone has died/ And I wish they would stop/ The killing.)
She lives a few miles away now, on Belmont Avenue, but is back in Pigtown every day for the poetry program.
More than 50 kids, from toddlers to teens, enrolled in this summer's camp. It was intended for youngsters ages 8 and older, but some of the children wouldn't be able to come if they couldn't bring their younger siblings. Plus, Keith is still watching a 2-year-old boy who used to be in her day care. She had to put her day care business on hold as a condition of her fellowship, but the boy's mother can't afford child care and Keith takes him for free.
Older kids come as volunteers or through YouthWorks, the city's annual summer jobs program, to help supervise, but they write poetry, too. Darrin, a hospice worker, runs sports programs for the kids during the hours in the summer when they're not writing poetry, then goes to work at night. Keith's mother runs the office. Charles Dugger, a longtime English teacher in the city schools, comes by with a van twice a week to take kids swimming at the Riverside Park pool. The city provides free breakfast and lunch, part of a government program to feed poor children when they're not in school.
Monthly, Keith brings in local poets to read and talk to the kids. At the after-school program during the academic year, a Salisbury University professor comes in to critique the children's poetry. Keith also tries to pair children with other activities, be it a photography project and a football league, anything to keep them occupied and off the streets.
"We don't have finances," she said. "You have to find people who believe in your dream."
On a Monday morning three days before the poetry slam, the kids play "duck duck goose" as Keith pulls aside a 16-year-old, chiding him for his behavior over the weekend. He went to Pocomoke City to see a girl he met on MySpace and ended up without a ride home. Keith's 25-year-old daughter and her fiance spent eight hours driving to get him and bringing him home.
In the circle, two brothers don't know yet that they'll be going to a shelter at the end of the day. Their mom's boyfriend beat her up over the weekend.
Keith calls 13 girls downstairs for a poetry lesson. They sit on small wooden chairs, the older girls' knees bumping into the low fold-out table. The front door to the building is open, but it's no relief from the heat.
One of Keith's challenges is to find activities applicable to a wide age range. She's fond of one called "Boggle poetry," where, like in the real game of Boggle, kids form words from a random grid of letters, but then add the step of writing poems with their words.
They talk about how to spell cone, as in ice cream.
"Excuse me, baby," Keith says to a girl whose paper is blank. "I'm not havin' it. I know you can read and write."
Among the poems produced:
My feet is sleep, sleep, sleep/ My feet feel the beat, beat, beat/ And after it feel the beat it went to sleep
Someone pops a water balloon. The floor wet, they move into the Hall of Fame, sprawling out on blue gymnastics mats in front of fans to write about their dreams: being a doctor, a rock star and a veterinarian - "to make animals look divine."
One girl dreams of being a teacher, visiting Las Vegas and working at EZ Pass with her mom. Another dreams of not having to constantly baby-sit for her two little sisters.
"I dreamed that my mom was here," says a 7-year-old whose mother moved to Oklahoma.
Early that afternoon, on the sidewalk outside the church, two police officers reach into the pockets of young man with low-slung jeans and a bare chest.
"There's kids that I lose that I would have loved to hold on to, but they need to make the choice between drugs and me," Keith says. "Sometimes the drugs win."
Later that week, the day's rain subsides in time for the poetry slam. Keith moves the event outside, where the temperature is pleasant. And her husband finds a functioning microphone at the last minute.
Keith begins the event by reading a poem she wrote more than 20 years ago.
The playground seems
so lonely as our children are
being slaughtered on the streets
"The struggle is really no different," she says. "Y'all keep fighting with me, OK?"
She turns the microphone over to the kids. They can read anything they wrote this summer, but most choose the poems they've just written on struggle. One makes Keith cry.
Miss Helans camp is like a haven for me
No matter how many drug dealers outside her gate I see.
sara.neufeld@baltsun.com