Bad Babies

April was National Poetry Month.  I wrote a poem a day as part of NaPoWriMo and this was a poem in response to a prompt to find a photograph and respond to it.  I didn't so much find this photo as remember that my husband had once taken a series of photos of our children's dolls strewn around our yard. Today I found the one you see here-- part of that series, and perhaps much tamer than my poetic memory.

Bad Babies; Photograph in Black and White

This spring rain reminds

me of the seasons our little

girls left their dolls under

bushes outside,

breast-bitten

toe-chewed,

balding Barbies

and the strange water-filled

ones, mostly naked, unblinking

pleasantly tolerating their

tortures,  their abandonments,

their still, solitary adventures,

regardless of weather,

in tree-root hovels

in the fairy forest yard.

How you captured

the mystery of your

girls and their girl things

never asking, exactly,

the dark questions behind

their careless kidnapper ways,

Why blindfold?

Why this one sitting up, alert-

The other face down in the

Dirt?  What happened here?

And instead,

walked the muddy

ground, pulled back leaf fall,

snapped them where they lay,

at the end of their stories or

forgotten mid sentence for supper

or at the beginning

we’ll never know.  Always the

patient observer, amused

and bewildered, you

took notes before mowing,

left the bad babies alone in case

their sweet, terrible mothers might

some day remember and return.

Beth Lodge-Rigal for the Poplar Grove Muse 

Photo by Dan Lodge-Rigal