OK, this series I'm going to read
is a series that's fairly new, so I'm
going to sort of sandwich it in.
And it's kind of only titled "Limbo Babies"
and there are five of these poems I'm going to read.
And you have to keep in mind that limbo--
I read this once and somebody thought
I meant those babies, you know, not babies
but that the babies were going under the bar, you know?
But that's not the kind of limbo baby I'm talking about.
I'm talking about that place that they tell you about,
if you go to Catholic school, that all the babies who are
unbaptized wind up in limbo.
So anyway-- and, you know, I thought
this was sort of a worthy thing to investigate
in a sequence of poems.
So "Limbo Babies."
"This fall, 25 more babies will be relegated to limbo,
according to sister Mary Francis.
We sat in the back row drawing a tree, a heart,
a man with a mustache while in limbo,
25 babies floated in a mist.
Disembodied is how we saw them.
A little sad, thinner than usual babies, bald.
And then the bell rang, Sister Mary Frances
shook her nun's sleeves.
Her glasses held the glint of scissors.
The limbo babies just floated around for eternity.
No spelling, no dinner, no homework."