Istanbul Literary Review - September 2011 Edition (#21)

Lotus Feet

Kelley Jean White

for my daughters, Low Hsia-lin and Low Hsia-wen,
and in memoriam, S.Y.T. Yang, Embroidered Moon, 1900-1993

Embroidered Moon, third daughter of Mayor
Yang, cries louder each night. Second Mother
bites her own tongue as she wets rags to bind
around the feet, ankles she tightly bends
each small toe against the sole; her own bare
feet betray the kitchen slave she was, fair
at twelve, she bore the Mayor’s only son--
now she tends these little girls whose mother
breathes through opium all day. Such fierce girls–
big sisters, Star and Cloud, cry too for Moon,
wake baby Rain, such noise–perhaps it soon
will be heard even in Western Quarters.
A Decree: The Mayor hears his daughters.
“Footbinding Must End.” Little Moon has won.

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)