Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Of That Beauty Crying, Each Cry Denied
by
Kelley Jean White
--Yang Sieu-yoeh, Gram, recorded 1993, New York
Of that beauty crying, each cry denied
I cannot speak—know she was my chosen
daughter, my broken child, all her brilliance
lost in a man’s deception, such shallow lies,
he’d make her watch him with other women
and she’d take him back for a single kiss
and I an old woman with no power
took her own children from her emptiness
we’d touch her hands, her porcelain face
sweet-smelling, wild, heavy with white flowers.
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
Kelley Jean White
USA
Kelley White is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School and worked as a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia
for more than twenty-five years. She has recently returned to her small New Hampshire village and begun work at a rural health center in the
North Country. Her poems have been widely published over the past decade, in journals including Exquisite Corpse,
Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association and in several chapbooks and full-length collections,
most recently TOXIC ENVIRONMENT from Boston Poet Press. She is the recipient of a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant in poetry.
Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)
