Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)

Sweet-smelling, Wild, Heavy With White Flowers

Kelley Jean White

--Yang Sieu-yoeh, Gram, recorded 1993, New York

Sweet-smelling, wild, heavy with white flowers
the gardens surrounding Father’s compound,
formal near the walls and paths laid with stone,
wooded by the little lake pavilions,
an artful kind of forest within bounds—
arched gateways to nothing, broken towers—
our wet-nurses let us run through the grass,
hair undone, barefoot, our raw sore small feet
unbound, our chance to be children so brief:
I was third sister, Jie-jie was just six.

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)