The Creation of Hope


Take a memory.
Add a thought,
a handful of questions,
and five tears.

Add the wings
of a mourning dove, 
a cruel caress,
a love, a lie,

a betrayed promise,
an aimless rage,
three sleepless nights,
and seven years.

Place in a pan, that,
each summer wide,
is ten winters long.

Finally, dust 
with a cloud of doubt.

Place in the oven
of a heart that is broken,

and bake for an hour
or a lifetime.

*

You will know it is done
when the stars are brighter
than when you began,

when the sea chants
to the sleeping hill

and blind with morning
is the sun,

when the birds dance
in the sky and shout
with castanets
gold and shrill,

when the snake slips
from its curdled skin,

and the chrysalis 
peels back to free
the Monarch’s brief,
painful beauty,

and you see an angel
cross the sky,
its wings transparent
as a dragonfly’s,

when, with the sun,
the old earth leaps
in the savage dance
of all beginnings,

and you wake, weeping
with a wild joy,
wondering where
your despair has died.

Take a spoon
of distant sigh,
silver whisper,
finch’s cry,

and feast on it,
o dearest love,

on the shortest day 
of the longest year, 
at the darkest hour 
of the deepest night.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first two stories in the “Otherwise” series: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and 
The Judgment Of Biestia.