The Girl Who Could Lose Everything For Hope
She was this girl with lost eyes,
who loved the little brook beside her house,
and found solace in cracking open a beer can
just when the evening broke a day's back.
.
Nobody ever knew that she knew
Plath's poems by heart and followed
the news of protests led by women,
helpless to her distance.
.
Her bed would often be her office,
her pillow a desk to open the world at will,
as she seeked poetry to assuage her nerves,
and think of love as sex postponed.
.
She told me over the static to come visiting,
she craved the feel of skin to her touch:
she said her house was easy to find -
the house behind the tree shedding flowers.
.
I told her how delicious avocados were with sour dough bread,
and she told me how her dad was without cigarettes for a week -
for a while we were conjoined with our tiny histories,
wondering why trivia was such a comfort.
.
So much about me now is about knowing you, I said,
and she said - we are just consolations, you know -
just hoping enough to get by,
just remembering enough to forget what hurts,
.
just hoping enough to get by,
just remembering enough to forget what hurts.
Hope is a strange beast. It is sometimes the only false note in our lives, and paradoxically, or because of that, is also the slender thread which keeps us alive to possibilities of life. Little things take on meaning - little actions, little thoughts - nothing seems untoward or wasted.
Those who are too hopeful, are called foolish, sometimes foolish optimists. But when something is a lifeline and gives meaning, how can that be bad.
Being foolish is a choice so many are willing to make simply because it gives an extra colour to the dawn, removes the colour of pain from an iridescent evening, gives something to look forward to in life when everything is gray and impenetrable and unreachable.
Hope is that dream which one can tangibly feel, like the bird which flies by but drops a broken feather in your hands - the bird might fly away but it does leave behind beauty, and something to hold onto....
Hear the poem!