By: Olga Dugan
The Frame
spring cleaning done, redressing walls
my niece, and day pupil since illness,
early retirement, holds up a lifetime
achievement for distinguished teaching
awarded Graduation Day, May 2007
fourteen years ago, when she was
too young to ask: is the frame gold?
shall I tell her that it’s real gold, but
only a thin layer, plated onto a silver
surface electrochemically? or,
that it’s quid pro quo, the appearance
of solid gold for a golden silence?
tell her how it now frames
a certificate that slipped, at first,
pasts an official’s desk
into a raggedy black folder
in a raggedy interdepartmental
envelope addressed to “tar baby”
that cluttered my faculty mailbox
because the same rage
razing area schools, raising juvenile
penitentiaries, deemed a black
woman with a PhD still just black
regardless the committee of peers
who selected this lone member
of color to their august ranks, tipping
their hats to all I achieved by forty-three
I watch my niece, beautiful
and brown, fifteen and full of hope,
an astronomer who’ll work
as a geriatric nurse, rehang the award
using such care and attention to balance
unaware of Chee-na, who—done
alarming folks with her bad as a bone
bark—prances to my chair now
and sprawls her foot-length chihuahua
body in its shadow, wise enough
to wait out the heat and resume her
battles on a cooler day…
I tell my niece
it’s gold.
Alchemy on 61st Street
winter, spring, summer, fall—no matter
how many times I passed that lion, toothless
marking the steps of a corner house on 61st
Street, he just looked resigned as all get out
what could he do about the biotic emeralds
sprouting across his face his body, blooming
in his mane? he was merely abiotic, made
of stone after all. then again, I’m wondering
just today, if he could speak, would the lion,
almost covered in algae and fungi, tell me
he was given life? having eaten the sun, having
faced overwhelming passions, emotions,
desires, he was in transition? nature consuming
him, eyes wide open, the lion was becoming
a golden soul? silly thinking, but, no, I recall
the days before Lipedema when I could walk
all over my city marveling at the ways nature
broke through cement, rock, stone to produce
rows of Arabis in cracks of pavement, and
everywhere, even near the squat houses under
the bridge at Front and Delaware, there grew
roses, representing or so it seemed, all 150
species and its thousands of hybrids, coloring
neighborhoods and neighborly connections
never ceasing to amaze at how much stronger
and lasting nature is over anything our hands
can make, how the smallest sample—lichen
on stone, roses creeping along brick—can be
so mighty/tremendous, how even this anomaly
of nature, abnormal swelling disfiguring thighs,
crippling my gait, afflicting my life, has blessed
with time and mind to walk and talk with lions
Ode for ordinary heroes
(for Mom and Kerise)
Two girls.
Both 4-years old; both the same height.
Both ice cream lovers; both wearing
similar clothes. Both claiming themselves
closer than sisters at one’s birthday party
when some older child deems, “you
can’t be twins, you have different skin
colors.” The white girl cries, “you don’t
know what you’re talking about”; then,
the black girl, “we share the same soul!”
Two boys.
After assuring the one with autism,
“you’ll have a great first day,” his
mother heads back to the car. Her heart,
rattled with prayers for his safety against
hurt and mockery, stops when she hears
his cry. But turning to go save him,
she sees the one with compassion
grab her son’s hand. He consoles as he
walks her son to the door and inside
the school, changing in a precious
moment, the whole world as she knew it.
Two teens.
Ten years ago, their parents closed
the gap between a shooter and then baby
brother Paul, trenched in a shopping cart
full of school supplies for his sister,
Ali, turning six and safe at the rancher
their parents had just finished for them.
Today, a decade / a century after laying
Mom and Dad to rest, the teens serve
lemonade and cake then labor side
by side with neighbors, tending
the beds of golden poppies mounded
by red birds of paradise and the dusky
pink of Egyptian stars we had planted
all around the house their parents built.
Olga Dugan is a Cave Canem poet. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, her award-winning poems are forthcoming or appear in Channel (Ireland), Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Sky Island Journal, The Windhover, The Sunlight Press, Grand Little Things, Ariel Chart, The Write Launch, E-Verse Radio, The Southern Quarterly, Kweli, Poems from Pandemia – An Anthology, and several other literary publications. Olga holds a PhD in Literary History and Culture from the University of Rochester, and her 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.”
"While writing these poems, I was thinking about using line breaks and associative logic to hopefully create a sense of flow that would lead the readers’ ears and eyes down the page. Breaking lines with less punctuation, for example, would ultimately allow more of the lines to take only a breath to utter, like measure in a song. Breaking some mid phrase would aid in starting more lines with verbs and nouns versus prepositions and conjunctions in an effort to strengthen each poem’s spine, which also helps to regulate its cadence, its pacing.
As always, the stories my poems tell hinge all I try to do with line, rhythm, imagery, and so on. And to shape the stories in these particular poems, I focused on using associative logic, or what I understand as a collaboration between the conscious world of facts and the subconscious world of symbols. I wanted to consider how things of personal interests—a frame, a stone lion, simple acts of selflessness and compassion—can symbolize or carry memories, thoughts, beliefs, that reveal ways in which people share experiences across time and space more often than not. The very cool take away for me was finding in the Webster definition of cathexis affirmation of what I was trying to do through associative logic: 'investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.' And now my work has been given a home here..."