Art by Katherine Leckie
Hope, like love and grace, is a word that’s easy to cliché. And difficult to define. Maybe because those four letters arranged as such spell more than a dictionary can contain. They spell a welling up in mind and heart of another day, chance, horizon. Hope is more like those magical tents in Harry Potter, appearing minuscule but inexplicably packed with everything we need to live.
Poetry, too, for me, performs that same magic. “‘Hope’ is a thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote.
As I now have far fewer years in front of me on this delicious and declining planet, I find myself ducking into that poetic enchanted tent called hope more and more. Each time I’ve come forth, I’ve held in my head and heart a new definition of that small powerful word. Here are a few of those offerings.
The Cardboard Regatta
Stiff-paper schooners painted kaleidoscope orange, green, yellow, red, white, and blue wag at water’s edge. Proof we dream in color. Land-bound children, swimsuit-clad, buoyed with anticipation, christen their crafts with waves of laughter. Surely their dad-designed creations will go the distance. The vessels, S. S. Guppy, Seas the Day, Minnow, Resilient, and Anonymous, are burdened to the gunwales with young pirates and crafted expectancy. Resilient is smartly armored in tinfoil. Cheers animate summer air. The crowd counts down, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!
Starter pistol claps the hot July air like a slap on a newborn’s butt.
Paddles froth blue water white. Parents scurry, yearning them seaward. Prows bump; sterns swirl; boats sink. The race is not long-lived. The S. S. Guppy swamps like soggy cereal, its diminutive captain shouting commands. Several others likewise scupper. The Minnow is swallowed, not even marking a three-minute tour. Seas the Day and Anonymous scuttle. Sinking crews stroke for pool’s edge. The Resilient surges but, tinfoil be damned, also disintegrates. Hoots drown in debris-filled water. Stiff-paper chunks colored kaleidoscope orange, green, yellow, red, white, and blue bob and founder.
I tack homeward, in mind that hope doesn’t always float.
Listen Quieter
The air sings with hummingbirds.
Dragonflies dance the tune.
Dawn light intones new notes.
A voiceless angel-ballad
Tempting me to alter my song.
To hush my timpani of thundering grief,
Silence the elegy of discordant lyrics
Reverberating in my brain.
To ignore the endless bass
Thumping blue in my veins.
New subliminal music
Flows between my heart’s beats.
Vows harmony in the rests, melody in the pause,
Assurance in the hushed tempo.
Today I listened quieter and heard a new song.
Written in the Sky
The full moon hung
On the horizon like a period,
Signaling the end of the sentence of night.
And compelled us forward
Into the dawn of unwritten sentences
Of new life and light.
Pain Reinterpreted
Black and blue color a bruise
Evidence of past pain rising to the surface.
Daub in a shard of gold and silver
And hope rises for another day.
Eugene C. Scott
Dr. Eugene C. Scott lives in the Rocky Mountains with his wife Dee Dee where he’s currently writing a hybrid memoir titled Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws: My Journey with Fear to Faith. Eugene is a retired Presbyterian pastor and pastoral counselor who’s written for Christianity Today, The Edge of Faith, Hostcollective.org, Bugle Magazine, and many others. You can read more and sign up for his blog, The Muse in the Mess, at eugenecscott.com or connect with him on Facebook, Instagram, or X @eugenecscott.
Katherine Leckie
Katherine Leckie is a contemporary painter based near the beautiful city of Cambridge in the UK. A chaser of the good, true and beautiful, my work is rooted in the belief that paying attention to the world around us can become a way of encountering something deeper.
