photo_camera by Ron Smith on Unsplash
People are not supposed to give up hope
but what can we do?
There have been too many hospitals.
My children were all born there.
As if a hospital could be beautiful
you stayed on for eight days.
Beautiful silver wire
beautiful sterile dome
beautiful oxygen
beautiful morphine.
The time had nearly passed—
beautiful mother’s milk.
I will always protect you.
Laura Schaeffer is a 2016 graduate of Goddard College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her poetry has been published in The Pitkin Review, Ars Poetica, Currents, Poetry Corners, and The Far Field. She is particularly interested in creative collaborations, writing as resiliency, and poets who have endured displacement and alienation due to war and social oppression. She is currently working on a collection of poems addressing the heroin epidemic.
