Read on for two poems – both emerging this week from a time of much in our world and country. And selves.

Consider.

Where are you? What words serve you? What words stand beside you in company, hold your hand, offer you some needed ground? Or space? Or the place that calls to you?

You choose this week,
To long for
or
To hope.

With gratitude for your open hearts and minds,
Rachel

“Mama, I miss you,” 5 year old Nora says through the hollows of the phone, “Will you come here tomorrow?”

“Yes, Nora. I will be there tomorrow,” I say to my youngest child.

To miss someone can feel like a deep hole. A longing. A magnetism.

A longing that seemingly cannot be answered without seeing, holding, touching the one whom we miss.

Or even a time for which we yearn.

Gone. Past. Dissolved with the sunset of yesterdays.

That ache in the chest and lump in the throat of
grief
sadness
tenderness
revealing the softest spots of our being.

The raw heart.

Open and revealed for all to see.

Close your eyes. Let yourself touch that which stops you

in

your

tracks.

Deep, sinking footprints tattooing fresh snow.

Ah, so…
longing

this is.

To hope means

what?

To allow for the possibility of different. Of brighter. Of open space that accepts anything
as the Next.

Hope feels like the candle prick in the pitch of dark.

Or perhaps the candle wick in the pitch of dark. Waiting to be found by the match.
Wick black as night. Tucked into night’s cloak.

Hope goes broader
and higher
than we are right now.

Hope drives down deeper. Into bedrock and beyond. Strata of old. Of survival and sustenance and spirit driven onward.

Hope slices through the silence like shafts of light through the cracked and plastic vertical blinds.

Spin

Slice.

Hope pauses and pulls from center of hardened rib cage forward into open space.

Arc. Pull.                                            GO.

Into the void of not knowing. But of wondering,
What now?
What next?

Hope burns softly, a little stronger, a little hotter. A spreading flame outward and upward.

Exploding, swirling, churning, burning,
stillness,
possibility.

Anything is possible. Anything.

Ah, so…
hope

this Is.