This being a poem about hope –
the somewhere-over-the-rainbow expectation,
the glad tidings of great joy, all praise the day and wildflower meadows,
that sort of thing…
…when realistically…
…each daily anguished menu presents us with
famine and brutish headlines, forgotten hostages, the reek of war
and sudden maiming and incomprehensible atrocities,
and pay day loans, and penury pensioners,
the ceaseless valley of enveloping, crushing shadows….
external conditions that restrict and make us quake.
We are besieged by the everything of everywhere,
we are no longer local, though we are confined.
We have become captives of these temporary afflictions and abominations,
our aspirations shrivelled by the immense, by the latest barbarism…
…and all our breaths are spaces between the melée
What chance hope in the tumult, under these drone-like visitations?
However, true hope is not a veneer, a superficial polish
nor an idealistic lightweight, or a nosegay in a sewer…
…but rather, hope is living intention.
Its substance is of persistence and endurance
a vibrant painting in a snow-stricken gulag,
a counter-culture, a jamboree uprising.
Hope is, skipping before a firing squad,
child’s play in the ruins
hallelujahs in a bomb shelter
a symphony in a panic room
Hope is the outrageous daring of not caring
yet being affronted by other’s sufferings
Hope… the habitation of the non-compliant,
Hope is oxygen and nutrients,
the deliberate star in the winter night sky, which continues us.
Hope, the sweet warmth of frankincense,
Hope, the promise of indelible cleansing,
Hope, the fragile ample…for now…
…the mislaid covenant, which honours later elevation…
Copyright © Stewart Henderson 2025
