FOREIGN WAR
Sundays in Germany everyone
walked. It was common to see
amputees. In the little Chapel
in the park was a list of wartime
dead: they took their soldiers
young, I said, fourteen, fifteen,
thirteen, this is a baby, this a woman
of seventy, civilian dead; we
do not see them on our walls,
no war on our shores, even the walking
wounded are few and far between,
the man with the hook at the fishing
tackle store, quite useful to me,
the full VA hospital in every city
but the veterans are old and dying
out at least the ones who can stand
when we play their marching song.
Kelley White
KELLEY WHITE was born and raised in New Hampshire and has degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School. She has been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for the past twenty years. She has had over 250 poems published by more than one hundred journals, including American Writing, The Café Review, Feminist Studies, and most recently, Whiskey Island Magazine and Rattle. A book of my "medical" poems, The Patient Presents, has been published by The People's Press in Baltimore, and a chapbook of very different material, "I am going to walk toward the sanctuary," will be published this summer by Nepenthe Books/Via Dolorosa Press. Kelley received a Pushcart nomination for an experimental piece from Gravity Presses in 2000, her first year of submission.
