Bitter
Even the lambs are gray. The ewes, new-shorn,
thin, seem bludgeoned by their children—each pair,
twins, butt too fiercely at empty udders.
This is the season when nothing is born,
when the weary mothers stolidly stare
through bare black tress, noses pressed to mud, or
sparse short grass. I don’t stop with my mother.
She clutches her boiled black coffee, her bit
of dried biscuit—no color here but those red
orange berries whose name I’ve forgotten, dead
fire burning in a roadside ditch.
I know now’s the hundredth time she’ll mutter
‘this is my last fall,’ for the hundredth sing,
‘but darling, it was a beautiful spring.’
Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, NO. HOPE STREET, was recently published by Kelsay Books.
