Shards of Life - Poems by Helen Boris

In 1949 a young woman originally from Ukraine alighted on the shores of Australia. She was a refugee, displaced through Soviet occupation of her homeland and the Second World War. She had lived the terror of dictatorship; grieved the death of family and friends; borne the loss of home and the destruction of any semblance of a normal life. 

Helen Boris would go on to build a new life in Australia. From the earliest days, she wrote poetry, both in English and in her native Ukrainian.

This is a selection of her English language verse, to share with the reader some fragments of her story, the "shards of her life".