30 Hope poems

The rain goes down and the hope doesn't grow but that's just for now: the day you love me that story will be done

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small. I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain, no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet .... Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and I repeated the one or two words we have for such grief until we were speaking only in tones. Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come so far, to taste so good.

A blue and green city, with the sun rising behind it, just not swiftly enough Don’t worry about being perfect. Just make sure you have some juice left in the pump I have many other remedies on hand, not just history’s bags of sumptuous soot Hello, I am beauty’s representative; I work in the self-improvement sector Don’t worry about being perfect. Just make sure you have some juice left in the pump How do you see yourself on the material plane of observed 
phenomena Hello, I am beauty’s representative; I work in the self-improvement sector Have you ever been sideswiped by a bad investment in love How do you see yourself on the material plane of observed 
phenomena You might need a reevaluation, an estimate, or an era to expire Have you ever been sideswiped by a bad investment in love Before you decide that you are nothing more than a clump or splatter You might need a reevaluation, an estimate, or an era to expire Have you learned how to remove yourself from every mirror you pass Before you decide that you are nothing more than a clump or splatter Let me tell you about the palm trees on the horizon of your future Have you learned how to remove yourself from every mirror you pass A blue and green city, with the sun rising behind it, just not swiftly enough Let me tell you about the palm trees on the horizon of your future I have many other remedies on hand, not just history’s bags of sumptuous soot

& what if hope crashes through the door what if that lasts a somersault? hope for serendipity even if a series of meals were all between us even if the aeons lined up out of order what are years if not measured by trees

Perhaps you can tell children that the world is always a more beautiful place than you can suppose, and then you release them into their future, the black row of trees in the distance. She died suddenly in midwinter, in the same bed in which her husband died years earlier; it still sagged on his side. Her second husband remained in Japan with his first family. She used to say, what my three girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me. My mother is the middle daughter, a garden of inaudible tunes. The four of them lived in a mean house in Seoul. One yellowing picture of my grandmother remains, and her face turns away from the camera, as the rabbit senses the hound; she was said to be a solitary eater, an inner thing. What did she promise the world that she wasn’t able to make good on? A child who abruptly feels the frontiers of experience assert themselves in her: at the funeral my mother cries so hard she can’t feel her hands for days, it explains how she scratches herself raw, meaningless. You have always believed these are your themes: fate, the negative pleasures of dipping oneself in acid. You think it will rescue you from your simplicity, remarks my mother from the doorway, but art is never the ace in the hole. I am not a stupid child. I am not even a child any longer, with her hesitant, then terrible certainty, that loss is tragic, not only pointless. When she is lonely, my mother cooks; and when she is happy, she knows to hide it.

Believe in this. Young apple seeds, In blue skies, radiating young breast, Not in blue-suited insects, Infesting society’s garments. Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz, Tearing the night into intricate shreds, Putting it back together again, In cool logical patterns, Not in the sick controllers, Who created only the Bomb. Let the voices of dead poets Ring louder in your ears Than the screechings mouthed In mildewed editorials. Listen to the music of centuries, Rising above the mushroom time.

I thought of happiness, how it is woven Out of the silence in the empty house each day And how it is not sudden and it is not given But is creation itself like the growth of a tree. No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark Another circle is growing in the expanding ring. No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark, But the tree is lifted by this inward work And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering. So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours And strikes its roots deep in the house alone: The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors, White curtains softly and continually blown As the free air moves quietly about the room; A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall— These are the dear familiar gods of home, And here the work of faith can best be done, The growing tree is green and musical. For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life's span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless; Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

In winter, it is what calls us from seclusion, through endless snow to the end of a long driveway where, we hope, it waits— this letter, this package, this singing of wind around an opened door.

So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see. It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty. The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees In a shirtsleeves summer breeze. But daylight saving is over. And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover Is over. And it’s altogether November. And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.

I Tomorrow I will start to be happy. The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar. Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne. Today will end the worst phase of my life. I will put my shapeless days behind me, fencing off the past, as a golden rind of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land. It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today. Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday. II Australia, how wise you are to get the day over and done with first, out of the way. You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while we are dithering about which main course to choose. How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt: the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices are revealed to you before our bidding has begun. Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill. When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light. III Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018. A date without character or tone. 2018. A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature. Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed. Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely, vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual end-of-season sales; everything slashed: your last chance to salvage something of its style.