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Kelley White
Back
The sun laughs with a baby’s face
and breathes back the fire from Nagasaki,
look, so fast, the buildings restore
and people called back from the oily shadows;
the sunbabe claps, and Hiroshima
is standing, whole, school children
run back to class and in Europe on another night
the moonchild smiles glass
back into panes and families
back away from the noisy train stations
unpack their backs, sit a moment, still, back home
Bad Mom
I was going to do it all perfectly: no chocolate milk
in the baby’s bottle, no glow in the dark chips or
candy before breakfast (ok...someone once said
‘three squares’ a day and I had no idea what they were
talking about) but I didn’t want to be all the Bad
Moms on the post office wall (and as a pediatrician it
is pretty embarrassing when a patient’s family spots
my child screaming in the supermarket and my cart is
filled with soda and chips and absolutely no real
food) I’m guilty on all counts, soda all day, Nintendo
Festival all Night, and (this one I really do regret,)
breaking promises to a child. I try. I put the Easter
decorations out the Tuesday after this year, I
published poems (no less) about my kids; and when we
forgot F.B. once I had him sent Express Mail ( I wrote
a poem about that too,) and please believe it’s
painful when the school nurse calls and I can’t leave
a waiting room of kids less sick than mine. . .(who I
sent to school anyway...)
©2005 by Kelley White
A New Hampshire native, Kelley White studied at
Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School and has
been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for
more than twenty years. Her poems have been widely
published over the past five years, including several
book collections and chapbooks, and have appeared in
numerous journals, including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod,
Poet Lore, Rattle, and the Journal of the American
Medical Association.
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