Old Photographs

Gail White

Here is my mother, smiling, very chic,

come from the alien North at twenty-two

to see her married brother for a week;

but the week turned to months (as weeks will do)

while suitors flocked around. My father, who

was poorest of the lot, prevailed at last,

and when I asked her why, she said, “I knew

that he’d be good to me.” Fixed in the past,

I see a couple in their wedding clothes,

a Navy man in uniform, a queen

of Carnival. I see them at the Rose

Parade, the Derby – two who might have seen

the world together. They raised me instead.

I’ve come to love these strangers, now they’re dead.

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Winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, 2012

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Gail White is a formalist poet whose totem animal is the cat, as evidenced by her chapbook of cat poetry, Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where she currently owns two cats and feeds three others.

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Old Photographs Gail White

Old Photographs

Gail White