At Aquedoctan, 2018

by Kelley White

                             Claimed by the English in 1652, Weirs Beach,
                             on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire,
                             served as a summer gathering place for native peoples
                             as long ago as 8000 B.C.E.


Two or three Algerians are tossing a ball back and forth
with a couple of dancers from Brazil. A Cambodian mother tucks
her little girl into a small beach tent loaned by a Dominican family
whose Boston terrier chases a French Bulldog from Ecuador;
a trio of French Canadien children fly kites that grow smaller
and smaller in the heights of clouds while a German family
shares out another ball of string. Haitian music plays down by
the ‘Indian’ Statue where a small group of Jamaican soccer enthusiasts
chant ‘Kenya Lesotho Malawi Nepal.’ I pause for a moment
to ask an older Omani woman for the time. She points to her
empty wrist and introduces me to a Pakistani family with cell
phones and ‘the Queen’s’ English. The news from Qatar floats from
a boom box on a picnic table behind a Romanian family sharing
ice cream with a Swiss family and a Tunisian toddler. The radio
shifts to Ukrainian dance music and a Vietnamese man
picks up a napkin to wave over his head. I thought of Yemen.
I thought of Zambia. I think of my quarter Chinese, quarter
Afro-Caribbean granddaughter and her parents, aunts and uncles,
who would be welcome on this beach, who might speak a dozen
of the languages among them, sing a hundred of the songs, but then
I realized that I could think of no country, no country at all for me,
for my initial W, no country for that other half of that child, her two
grandmothers, blessed and cursed with an identity spelled w-h-i-t-e.


* * * * *

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.