Lara Dolphin // Rogations for a Ugandan Child // Poetry
Lara Dolphin
Rogations for a Ugandan Child
(Previously curated by Rusty Truck)
May the sillage of Mugoyo that your mother carries from fire to table
Wake you from resplendent dreams to the start of a new day.
May the uniform scrubbed by hand in a plastic tub then hung on the line
Be crisp and dry and ready to wear.
May the fragrant oil rubbed into your scalp
Make your braids neat and smooth.
Tugende, Mukwano! May your father’s electric Tuk Tuk
Convey you safely to school before he heads to work.
May the new metal roof above your classroom
Protect the desks from sun or heavy rains.
May the teacher’s chalk and your No. 2 pencils and notebook
Last until all the lessons have been taught and learned.
May you grow and live and shine.
May you be of service to your people.
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The Nation That Doesn’t Want To Be A Brueghel
(Previously curated by Lothlorien Poetry Journal)
About suffering they are never wrong,
The Ugandans: how reluctantly they concede
To its hierarchy: how it lingers
Over phone batteries dying and getting coffee orders wrong;
How, when the elders are earnestly, fervently waiting
For the blessed rain, there will necessarily be
Children who complain that they do not want it, kicking
A football ball near the edge of town:
They never doubt
That Maslow’s pyramid must be climbed from the bottom
Anyhow in a field, some weathered soil
Where women harvest sweet potatoes before weevils
Arrive with the dry season.
In Brueghel’s Gallows, for instance: how everything taunts
Quite pointedly the authority; the dancers may
Have seen the scaffold, the leafless tree
But for them it is of small regard; the state endures
As it has for decades of enforced disappearances
And the chattering magpies that must have seen
Something astonishing, a country about to come undone,
Perch nearby and mimic the cries of the poor.
~after Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
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A native of Pennsylvania, Lara Dolphin is an attorney, nurse, wife, and mother of four. Her chapbooks include In Search Of The Wondrous Whole (Alien Buddha Press), Chronicle Of Lost Moments (Dancing Girl Press), and At Last a Valley (Blue Jade Press).