Philadelphia Murder-a-Day Blues

Death’s another lamppost
Tied up with flowers and balloons
Here death’s another lamppost
Tied up with flowers and balloons
Teddy bears on the sidewalk
You know somebody was just killed

Might have been a bad boy
Must have been somebody’s son
Might have been a bad boy
He was still some mother’s son
And he’d be home for breakfast
‘Cept somebody had a gun

I hate to see the candles
Lit in a vigil round the base
I hate to see the candles
Puddles of wax around the base
And the letters and the pictures
Fading in the bitter rain

She might have been a bad girl
Addicted to something, selling sex
She might have been a scared girl



Stuck on drugs and selling sex
But you know she should have lived to
Raise her children, leave the street

Here sadness is a streetlight
Shining on blood and wasted life
Here madness is a streetlight
Shining on blood and hatred, knives
Don’t kill you so quite so quickly
Takes a bullet and some spite

He might have been eleven
Or twenty-six or seventeen
She might have been seven
Of eighty-two or only three
Guns don’t have eyes or ears or fingers
But the killers have all three

They sell guns on every corner
Stores, or from the back of cars
Bullets are on the shelf at K-mart
And at your local nuisance bar
Just takes a little flare of anger
Somebody’s going to the morgue

by Kelley Jean White

A New Hampshire native, Kelley White studied at Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School and has been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for more than twenty years. Mother of three, she is an active Quaker. Her poems have been widely published over the past five years, including several book collections and chapbooks, and have appeared in numerous journals including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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