TODAY, MY HOPE IS VERTICAL

Jane Hirshfield

Today, my hope is vertical.
Tomorrow it will be horizontal.
The next day, cloudy.
My hope is like a Greek myth:
exchanging skin for bark,
bark for scales,
scales for the hollow bones of a bird.
In these ways my hope
attempts to escape its fate.
In myth, hope surely knows,
escape is useless.
Still, hope will try.
I, who will someday leave behind
this three-dimensioned puzzle,
pity my hope.
Poorling, I say to my hope,
even I cannot spare you,
even I cannot make you mortal.
Winged, rooted, finned,
roofed or roofless,
of all my shapes, only you, hope,
know nothing of irony,
only you cannot be cynical
or cloak yourself
in the objectivity of grammar.
Only you
cannot suffer suffering.
You exempt, you deny,
you protest with speech and with silence.
You forgive—helpless to not—
in speech and in silence.
I, citizen of perspective,
born into the tribe of time,
will vanish into its blurring distance.
But you—most intransigent,
most stubborn of all my parts—
will be forced to continue.
How tenderly, with two open hands,
you reach again today for hunger’s apple