Linda Harris Dolan
ode to spottswood.
rocky patches in your fields and the ragweed grows so thick i think the bush hog won’t make a dent.
how could we not
have loved you?
you with your breeze, with your days unseasonably warm, and your hard, hard winter, and your ground so froze.
did you notice? the glitch, millisecond misfire in the genome you’d homed five generations and here we are wanting, missing you from hospital beds and hospital beds and—
we would have come back to you anyway. we would have laid our- selves in your hills anyway. our children, our children.
Linda Harris Dolan is a poet and editor. She holds an M.A. in English & American Literature from NYU, and an M.F.A in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Starworks Creative Writing Fellow. She’s former Poetry Editor of Washington Square Review and has taught at The King’s College and NYU. She's a 2016 Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.
What stands out is how the poem intertwines personal loss with the landscape, making grief inseparable from place. Much like playing Slope game, where balance and persistence keep you moving forward, Dolan’s lines show how memory and land together sustain us even through hardship.
The repeated FNF images of the hospital beds and the frozen ground really give this poem a feeling of grief mixed with attachment to place. I’m curious, is "Spottswood" meant to be a specific real location, or does it also represent a kind of family history and home?