HOPE

Sometimes, hope begins as instinct, a reaching, a hunger — and ends as memory. What remains, perhaps, is the ache that gave it shape.

Hope arrives after the first casting-out.
It’s fostered by a familiar scent,
a barely recognisable murmur —
the offer of the desired nipple,
the blessed end to chthonic emptiness.

Hope grows when a shape appears,
an entity not quite in reach —
a coloured, soft, squeezable thing
you don’t understand as needed,
but you do, nevertheless, need,
and you reach hopelessly for it,
and smile like a fool when it’s given to you.

Hope grows with you;
it motivates your first faltering footsteps,
propels you across the room
seeking that same garishly coloured object
lying tucked behind the cushion
just out of reach.

Hope is, therefore, the greediest of emotions:
tethered to longing, burdened by need.
Its father is intention, its mother necessity,
and despite fear, famine, and fright,
hope lives — and spreads.
It is a contagious aspiration,
an unlikely form of optimism,
an often-foolish longing,
but also, apparently, eternal.

He lies flat, spreadeagled in the mud,
looking along the barrel of a rifle, waiting for movement.
His finger is on the trigger.
There is no hope for either him or his quarry —
a kid probably his own age,
also spreadeagled in the mud,
also cold, also longing for an end,
because he gave up on hope
with his first kill.

She shifts her baby from one hip to the other,
wipes her face, and peers into the distance
where the tents shimmer on the horizon.
Around her are other mothers,
other babes lying listlessly against their breasts —
but there are so few toddlers,
the little ones who have perhaps only just learned
how fruitless hope can be.
The mothers are too weary to mourn them —
the weak who dropped behind,
those whose once-glowing skin
is now as dry as the leaves
at the bottom of a waterless river.

They say hope is eternal,
but so are the reasons for it.