Poet Joseph Ross, guestblogging at The Basin Blog, invited a number of poets (Naomi Shihab Nye, Naomi Ayala, and others to come) to answer the question: Where do I find hope?
Here's mine, posted today. The first paragraph:
Where do I find hope? My father is wont to quote endlessly Khalil Gibran, his family’s kinsman: “your children are not your children. They are life’s longing for itself.” In my own children, in their shining eyes and longing selves bounding into this world; in the work of poets and activists and workers who toil in darkness, in obscurity, in the pity or judgment of others; in the cycles of death and rebirth in the seasons; I see glimmers of a kind of vital perpetuity that all my apocalyptic nightmares, all of my pessimism about the human soul, all of my darkness and pain, cannot overwhelm....
Any comments welcome. Where do you find hope?
2 comments:
In a lotery ticket, in La Vegas, in praying, in a uprising, in a lonely woman.
I followed the link and read your full post at The Basin Blog.
I suppose what gives me hope, as much as anything, is the awareness that -- in spite of occasional claims and indications otherwise -- history is not over yet.
No matter how bleak it may seem in the short run, human beings have been here a long time, and living creatures a longer time, and the earth itself still longer... And although, in a sense, this could lead one to feel small in a large universe, it also helps lend perspective to the daily frenzies of our lives -- which are not over yet, which are not the whole story, and through which we may yet find our way.
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