This Time
by
Lynn Hoggard
Lynn Hoggard
Lynn Hoggard received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California and currently work at Midwestern State University, where she is a professor of English and French and the coordinator of humanities. In 2003, the Texas Institute of Letters awarded her the Soeurette Diehl Fraser award for best translation.
For several years, she was an arts writer for the Times Record News in Wichita Falls and wrote more than six hundred articles, features, and reviews. She has published five books: three French translations, a biography, and a poetry anthology. Her poetry has appeared in 13th Moon, Clackamas Literary Review, Concho River Review, Descant, New Ohio Review, The Oklahoma Review, Soundings East, Summerset Review, Wild Violet, and Xavier Review, among others.
You wash the final dishes clean, watching
bits of food swirl briskly, disappear.
You quit the sink and walk into the sunroom,
look through the window, see the long-dead grass,
the birdbath overturned again by wind,
the barren trees, the desiccated earth.
You're in a drought. You know no washing clean
will come here soon. The water in the land
sinks by the day. With summer's heat to come,
the earth may not sustain itself this time.
You press your hands together, intertwine
your fingers, study them in silence.
There'll be no washing clean this time,
this time of drought, of failing earth, of loss.
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