Hope

Poems where hope means asking questions, from Tom Large, Ed Gold, Chuck Tripi, and Martha Fox.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m not a great gardener. Last year, my harvest consisted of a couple zucchini, a few cucumbers, four tomatoes, and an eggplant. My most successful crop was trumpet vine. So last week when I finally got around to planting a few vegetables, I thought, “Why am I even bothering?” The answer, of course, was “hope.” Maybe good things will happen; maybe this year won’t be as bad as last year; maybe it’ll even be better. Hope. Sometimes, that’s all that keeps us going; sometimes that’s what makes life worth living. So on this episode of Burning Bright, some pieces about hope.

Tom Large said he often hear the sirens of police cars and ambulances. He said his poem started with his wondering where these sounds were coming from, and from there, he wondered who these emergencies, so commonplace and therefore so easily ignored, were happening to. Here’s Tom’s poem “I Hear a Siren Somewhere.”

The sirens in the city say
Someone is hurt somewhere
or someone is dying.
A wailing echoes through the streets,
insisting I have a broken brother,
a sister who is bleeding
or has simply lost her way.
She can’t give us her name
and we don’t have her address.
No, she doesn’t know the date today.

I no longer pray, but I do hope
there is someone waiting with her,
sitting beside her on the curb,
someone who’ll gently take her hand
though she keeps on crying,
and the siren’s scream gets closer,
drowning out all the human voices.

“I Hear a Siren Somewhere” by Tom Large from Passager’s 2020 Poetry Contest issue.

Ed Gold said he started this poem when a workshop leader gave the group lists of Elizabethan words and phrases. Here from Passager’s Issue 64 is Ed’s Jabberwocky-like poem “Loveship.”

That eye-bite you flashed me,
was it an amoret or a blench?
Are you my half-marrow,
or are you just foading me?

I am mally of your fernticles and murfles.
I swingle in the crisples of your hair.
I linger at your heart-spoon,
the soft curve of your nuddle.

Let’s shab out to the sky parlor
under the dream hole
and smick together and snoozle.
We will quaggle all over like jelly.

Don’t be carked:
there will be no afterclap.
I am no mere belly-friend or franion,
no wowf performing murlimews.

We are side by side
in the kissing crust,
and it smells
like cloves and oranges.

Ed Gold’s poem about the hope for romance “Loveship.”

Chuck Tripi was a pilot until a stroke ended his flying career. He said that this next poem grew out of recurring dreams and also photographs of a highway project that got him dreaming of flying airplanes again. “You Have to Dream an Easier Dream.”

You need to land a Boeing Seven Fifty-Seven
on a Sussex County road – it seems to you
outsized and impossible, but need is need.
Squealing tires, a screech of scattering cars,
screamers young and old, stampeding –
genders and colors and creeds, running mad,
having a bad day. You have to avoid the stacks.
You have to somehow miss the light pole
with your lowered wing. Do not snap the wires;
stay between the fences and the barriers.
No, the engines cannot catch and spool again,
there is no fuel to fire them. Only now, do this:
let a dream go deeper. There is a sign ahead
you cannot read across a footbridge – walk to it.

From Passager’s Winter 2014 issue, Chuck Tripi’s poem “You Have to Dream an Easier Dream.”

I began the podcast talking about my garden. We’ll end this episode about hope with Martha Fox writing about her garden. Martha said, “I wrangle with how best to find comfort during these harrowing times. For me, hope feels tangible in my garden.”

“For the ‘Nones.’” It begins with this epigraph from Pew Research: “More than a quarter of Americans list religious affiliation as “None.”

Of all the assurances intoned
in liturgy, the most excessive
is “We shall never hope in vain.”

Contrast that to this:
the glimmer of a tiny koi
in the black pupil of a pond
surrounded by a snowdrift.

Spring will come.
“Sumer is icumen in”
one of these days.

Then, fall’s lustrous letting-go,
lull of winter,
and the lions and lambs
of March again.

So let’s bundle storm twigs
from our dormant yards
and keep our eyes open
for arrowheads of snowdrops,
artifacts of some ancient’s wish,
poking through a patch of slush.

We can trust hope in the garden.

Martha Fox’s poem about hope “For the ‘Nones,’” from Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest issue.

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I’d like to read more, but I have to go out and water my garden.

For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.

Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.

Not Pictured: Chick Tripi