This Hope came through as a Facebook message on the 2×5 inch window of my smartphone yesterday. I’d been bushwhacking through paperwork, surrounded by computer screens and spreadsheets. I was feeling in the weeds, but far from loamy earth.

The beauty of these graceful words just grounded me. Made me wish I was a poet. Reminded me that art will save the world.

I know that we’re all busy, and when screens deliver messages we often only quickly scroll. And this, well, this is poetry, and we all know the trouble with poetry. The notion is romantic and lofty, but reading it takes time. It doesn’t give it all away on the first pass.

So here’s my morning dare:

Read this Hope twice. (At least). It’ll still take less than five minutes. Let it settle through your cells.

Comment on this post that you took time for poetry today. Forward to a friend. Ask them to do the same.

Listen to the serum of these words.

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Alive Together: New and Selected Poems)

Thank you Steven, for taking time to share