Hope Poems
Verses for the candle that outlasts the dark.
These poems examine hope closely rather than just cheering for it - the specific difference between not yet and never, the odd persistence of a season that always circles back. For a short version of the same idea, see Quotes.
They said the fall would finish me—
they had not counted on the rising,
on the stubborn thing inside a person
that finds falling unsurprising.
Fall again. It is allowed.
The ground is not your home.
Every person who has...
You do not need to see the whole road,
you only need the next small light,
the one step in the darkness
that moves you through the night.
The great distances are walked
in one-step-at-a-time increments,
the summit reached by...
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The darkest hour has a famous habit
of arriving just before the light,
of making you believe it's permanent
when it's only the last of the night.
Believe before the dawn confirms it,
trust before the evidence appears—
this is...
Your voice is not a smaller voice
because fewer people know it yet,
the song that isn't sung yet
is no less of a song for that.
Speak what you have been given to speak,
write what only you can...
Life Poems
Impossible is just a word
for things not yet attempted,
a border drawn by those who stopped
before the possible was entered.
Every wall that now seems permanent
was once someone's decision to stop—
the ones who broke it did...
The best time to plant the seed
was twenty years ago, they say—
the second-best time is right now,
this specific, unrepeatable today.
Do not grieve the planting you delayed,
grieve nothing that cannot be changed—
plant the seed into...
The mountain does not give itself to hurry,
it gives itself to those who keep the pace,
who rest when resting is required
and then return to the upward face.
The summit is not for the fastest—
it is for...
The dawn has never once forgotten
to arrive after the night—
not once in all the turning of the planet
has it failed to bring the light.
Hold this thought at three in the morning
when the dark feels permanent...
Beneath the frozen ground all winter
the seed is doing its invisible work—
pressing upward through the packed indifference
of the cold that makes it neither stop nor shirk.
We cannot see it from the surface.
The field looks empty,...
Love Poems
One candle holds the whole room's darkness back—
a single flame against the accumulated night,
and the darkness, for all its depth and practice,
has no answer for the light.
Hope is the candle. It does not need
to be...
Not yet is not the same as never—
the distance between them is the whole field of hope,
the whole practice of the faithful,
the whole length of the long rope.
Not yet means the door is still a door,...
In all the years the earth has been the earth,
the spring has not once skipped a year—
has not looked at the hardness of the winter
and decided not to reappear.
It comes with its ridiculous optimism,
its pink...
Hold on a little longer—not forever,
just longer than the feeling says to stop,
just long enough for the season to remember
to turn before you reach the drop.
I know how long the long night is—I've lived one.
I...
Dear future self: I am writing this from the middle,
from the part where nothing is yet resolved,
where the questions outnumber the answers
and the problems remain to be solved.
But I am writing you anyway, as proof
that...
