Dreaming the Spring

An Offering by a Prize-Winning Local Poet

Like many of my friends and acquaintances I've struggled to maintain equilibrium in this time of darkness and uncertainty. But then daffodils and hyacinths appeared in the garden, this beautiful offering by poet and novelist Kika Dorsey came up on Facebook, and hope reasserted itself.

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Dreaming the Spring

By Kika Dorsey

A change of light in February washes the grass of snow and things I’ve lost—a crystal ring, a silk scarf, moments of peace, the taste of seawater—come back to me, the crystal splashing rainbow prisms on the walls. Even my dreams return to me in the morning. In one I pull Russian dolls out of my womb. They are warriors, I think, and when I awake, I open each to reveal smaller and smaller clones like the labyrinth of my body, multiplying cells. In another I lose my phone after jumping a fence to see a garden of flowers, to smell the peonies. I am supposed to call an old lover the next day. I awake and call him only to hear his mother died in the cold of winter.

I have two children seeking out the ropes of light they need to climb the world. It’s a steep mountain face, I know, and I give them my weapons of love, the ones that feed the people so there is no war. On the horizon is the pink light of morning and my garden isn’t born yet but it dreams of peonies, poppies, and peace. Daydreams. The kind of dreams that we wake into and not from, where before us in the light a world beckons to blossom.

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As I see it, Kika has created the kind of joyous ode to spring we'd expect from a poet--possibly one of the Romantics--though this is not about nightingales and leaping lambs. "Dreaming the Spring" is celebratory but celebration is shadowed by a touch of melancholy.

Throughout, you encounter those lovely words "light," "crystal," "peace," "rainbow," "dreams," "love," but Kika isn't sentimental. Her ecstasies are earned. Those Russian dolls may be toys, but they're also warriors. They also represent the complex wonder of the human body, including multiplying cells--which can of course be threatening as well as healthful. And at the end of the first verse there's cold winter and a death.

This is immediately followed by life and the lovely metaphor of Kika's two children "seeking out the ropes of light they need to climb the world." There is no war now, but the promise of imminent life and beauty.

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Kika Dorsey teaches literature and creative writing classes at the University of Colorado. While finishing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Seattle, Washington, she performed her poetry with musicians and artists and wrote about German and Italian modern and postmodern writers.

Her poems have been published in The Denver Quarterly, KYSO Flash, The Comstock Review, Narrative Northeast, The Columbia Review, among numerous other journals and books. She is the author of four poetry collections, Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010), Rust, Coming Up For Air (Word Tech Editions, 2016, 2018), and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award.

You can find Kika's work including her novel As Joan Approaches Infinity on her Amazon page. We interviewed her about her turn toward fiction on this Substack in July last year.