31 Hope poems

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.

when I beheld a fire win out against a hemisphere of shadows. —Inferno, Dante (tr. by Allen Mandelbaum) If I could hold a fire against a hemisphere of shadows, hold it close, not so that damage finds my hands, but so fire scatters galvanizing strands, my pupils responsive to the flames’ unbridled tutelage as they tell me nothing but these little jumps out of your definitions, small or large or leaping, sinking, slumped

And if sun comes How shall we greet him? Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him After so lengthy a Session with shade? Though we have wept for him, Though we have prayed All through the night-years— What if we wake one shimmering morning to Hear the fierce hammering Of his firm knuckles Hard on the door? Shall we not shudder?— Shall we not flee Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter Of the familiar Propitious haze? Sweet is it, sweet is it To sleep in the coolness Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.

When despair— you who enjoyed great triumphs and walked with confidence and the memory of many gifts of delirium and dawns and unexpected turns— when despair wants you in its grip, and threatens you from some unfathomable depth with destruction and the guttering out of your flame: then think of the unsatisfied ones, with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions, loyal to a few memories that held out little hope, who still bought flowers, and with a smile of not much luminosity confided secret desires to their small-scale heavens that were soon to be extinguished.

And if sun comes How shall we greet him? —Gwen Brooks The sun came, Miss Brooks,— After all the night years. He came spitting fire from his lips. And we flipped—We goofed the whole thing. It looks like our ears were not equipped For the fierce hammering. And now the Sun has gone, has bled red, Weeping behind the hills. Again the night shadows form. But beneath the placid face a storm rages. The rays of Red have pierced the deep, have struck The core. We cannot sleep. The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm. The darkness ain't like before. The Sun came, Miss Brooks. And we goofed the whole thing. I think. (Though ain't no vision visited my cell.)

Has the bright sun set, Has the gale grown stronger? Still we’ll not grieve yet: We will sing a while longer! Has our youth been met By Time the wronger? Let us not grieve yet, Let us sing a while longer! Is the world beset, Do the sorrows throng her? Let us not grieve yet: Let us sing a while longer!

If the angle of an eye is all, the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life, what is the light of this city, light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world, light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love, light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven, light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace, light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas, light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit, light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops, the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons, the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious: the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks, all of us making and unmaking ourselves, hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only: free in time but not from it, here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling that is fleeing, for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on? I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.

photo of United States from outer space in trash green fire held to everything as everyone whirls into abs- tr- action a moment with the crystal and the weight of the house is released we hold fast we hold one another we hold to the vigor of the street pain of picked flower our frame reckless but never monochrome everything the speed and tension of eloping saunter past barricades waking not sleeping to dream

Like hope it springs eternal, existing in discrete but spherical units, a mist of total but encapsulated salvational events. If any two of these bubbles bang against each other no walls collapse or double to a larger chamber unlike the halls of soap.

Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.