30 Hope poems

Love faded in my heart— I thought it was dead. Now new flowers start, Fresh leaves outspread. Why do these flowers upstart And again the leaves spread? Oh, when will it be dead— This root that tears my heart!

Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight. Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away ... O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presiden tial election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas. / You don't remember because you don't care. Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen:You don't know because you don't care. / Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own:You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you? / I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

All year, death, after death, after death. Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky, God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night, never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights lead the way home, but maybe too early to find the moon turning half its body away, holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief breaks over you when you've already given all you've got and hands you tools you don't know how to use. The blush of dark thirty turned bleak when I heard about the O— O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m., hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake, as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it. Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating. And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire, import a ballistic missile to crown its village green? Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes," but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East, telling me with the gravest authority— that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there: "Hatred is in the rocks."

Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don't look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits - eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You'll never know who's down there, frying those eggs, if you don't get up and see.

What is Hope? A smiling rainbow Children follow through the wet; ’Tis not here, still yonder, yonder: Never urchin found it yet. What is Life? A thawing iceboard On a sea with sunny shore;— Gay we sail; it melts beneath us; We are sunk, and seen no more. What is Man? A foolish baby, Vainly strives, and fights, and frets; Demanding all, deserving nothing;— One small grave is what he gets.

Today there has been so much talk of things exploding into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we all run outside into the hot streets and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth you can always see. With more sparkle and pop is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes into acid jazz. Small typewriters that other people keep in their eyes click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving their broken little hands.

I had a week where i didn't think about you every single day that was a good week i'm banking on more of those

It gets better i know this is cliche i know you're tired of hearing it but it got better for me and i was the one who believed it least

i remember my grandmother singing it in the kitchen not performing just singing if god watches sparrows then surely surely surely