All this Hope

The hope of all things is wrapped in deficiencies and risings,

barren winters and promising springs of survival,

in soft-spoken disappointments and miscalculations.

Hope hovers and skims over thick, turbid obstacles bisected and

roamed over in sluggish, consistent crawl;

who’s crevices, craters, depths, summits, and breathless wonder

are memorized by dirt-formed fingertips and weight of exertion.

These climbings are never less than demanding; how could they be anything but?

Painless, they would exist treasureless

Treasureless, they would stand worthless,

Their burden and subsequent gentle wash unattainable to those who never seek

the rupturing, chilling wind of change and triumph from the broiling, polished ash.

All men are artists of their own making, carving out life around their obsessions.

And whether their obsessions rule them, or they rule over their obsessions and subdue the medium to good use

Is up to the virtue or vice crafted by each man, each woman, in their time

Tied down to their commonplace days of truthful contact with their wretched and glorious humanity.

The ordinary world suddenly trasfigured before them,

wrestling with their own chances and lack of courage,

Emerge from the fire without being consumed

published in vitality and actuality,

walking through the flood unextinguished by suffocating annihilation.

And when we think that we have hammered out all of the wounds and grief,

We rest briefly to climb again, knowing

We have more to do, and be, and become,

As we are doing, being, and becoming in present and future.

And no longer does the agony of humanity trap and cage the soul like a deafening, final clash,

but breaks off from choking when

the darkness of death has been crushed

Men and women spy hope wafting among the beauty of the earth and the features of the face of another person

Near to them.

That pinching cramp that squeezes and sharpens,

the plunging, collapsing, wrenching corkscrew of sacrifice

that forms the stem and origin of growth

germinating in the dark recesses and turned over by worms

before oxygenated, hydrated, and ignited by heat.

All this, must men and women welcome, a complete extinguishing of the old before

Resurrection.