A Language for Hope

A Language for Hope

Olga Dugan

this being—
                still in this chair—
too long nestling nurturing
dashed-after-dashed promises
of help, health, or heaven
swept up in a twister
of discontent and
                still in this chair—
freezes over, its heart
flung open to the flattening
hardening chill of a pitiful I
who cannot see a future
for months
until the patient—
                still in the next bed—
greeting me in the cheerful
tongue of a Gladiolus bloom
gold as her smile budding
somewhere mid ache and joy
laughter and forgetting precisely
because she’s
                still in the next bed—
thaws my heart to petals, rose
plush, soft enough to make
spring familiar again and hope
a thing this grateful I need
no longer see to believe

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Olga Dugan
Poet & Educator

Olga has been recently published in Relief Journal, Channel (Ireland), Sky Island Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Write Launch, Grand Little Things, E-Verse Radio, Ariel Chart, The Windhover, and The Sunlight Press. Articles on poetry, drama, and cultural memory appear in The Journal of African American History, The North Star, and in Emory University's “Meet the Fellows.”

Photography by Jessica Boynton