wanderlust

A Poem Discussing Scarcity Mentality And The Role That Hope Plays In Keeping Us Alive

Photography by Irving Penn

As humans,
we often think of life as an astronomical event.
That the stars will only align once,
Never again.
That we will never love once more,
Or that we will never experience a broken heart again.

The stars do align again,
But in a different lifetime.
When we are different people.

Just as winter always arrives, love.
Even when the sun threatens to swallow our world,
The winter shall always return, if only for a moment.
The winds and frost will unchain themselves.
This is known.

How many times have we as humans thought
This is it
The end of all things?

 


How many goodbyes have we gone through,
Just to see each other within a day,
Even if we are only residing in each other’s minds
As faded photographs?

I will not claim that the waiting is easy.
It never stings less.
It’s not a skill you can learn.

Longing is just another type of breathing.
For hours it just happens.
You do not spare it a second thought.

But in the still of the night
When your heartbeat is thunder,
You must remind yourself to stop holding your breath.
To let go.

People will leave.
This is a constant.
Let them.

People will return.
Even if these people are others in that person’s place.
Accept them.

And it will break your heart.
You will cry.
This is known.

You will cry.

But the thing that separates us from the beasts,
Is the human capacity to hope.

It will surprise you to see how much courage
hope lends to the suffering.
How strong the human spirit truly is.

‘Til the last breath is drawn,
We will hope for a ballad
‘Til the last words have been set on paper
We will hope for an oddysey
‘Til the last light has been seen dancing over the horizon
We will hope for a bold sunrise.

Amidst change
Hope is the only constant variable,
The still pond we keep within ourselves
in the midst of a raging torrent.

We cannot blame ourselves,
We are but human.
And to hope is to be human.

And we are, love.
We are beautifully vulnerable human beings.

 

—

Written by Milla Lintvelt

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