Daily Prompt:  Hope

 

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834):

 

Work Without Hope

 

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—

The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—

And Winter, slumbering in the open air,

Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!

And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,

Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

 

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,

Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.

Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,

For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!

With lips unbrighten’d, wreathless brow, I stroll:

And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,

And Hope without an object cannot live.

 

 

Me:

 

And if Hope’s object never comes to bear,

what then? Does Emily’s feathered thing still sing

for free? Does Maya still know why? Despair

can shrivel raisins, rot the meat, and bring

a crust sicksweet to pop. A noun, a verb,

a fear, a guiding star, Hope feels that what

is wanted can be had. Hope is, I’ve heard,

a spring, the spring, that grows this tiny bird…

 

Photo credit first photo: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/requiemm/277551104/”>requiemm</a&gt; via <a href=”http://foter.com/”>Foter.com</a&gt; / <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>CC BY-NC-ND</a>

Photo credit second photo: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/george_eastman_house/2720791262/”>George Eastman House</a> via <a href=”http://foter.com/”>Foter.com</a&gt; / <a href=”http://flickr.com/commons/usage/”>No known copyright restrictions</a>

 

For the month of May, I will be posting something daily, namely some kind of respond to The Daily Post’s daily prompt or some other prompt, unless a poem or post visits me of its own accord, unbidden and welcomed.  This one began at Coleridge and traveled through Dickinson, Angelou, and Hughes.  It is unfinished.