NaPoWriMo Day 15: Hope in a Hopeless Place

Did a friend forward you this email? Join our mailing list!

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: Love Letter to the Eve of the End of the Wor …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

First, make a list of things that make you feel hopeless. It can be personal, political, or anything in-between—just channel your frustrations. Do this for 3-5 minutes.

Second, make a list of images that make you feel hopeful. Think flowers blooming through the cracks of a sidewalk, or a poem read in the desert. Focus on things that are concrete and perceptible. Do this for 3-5 minutes.

We’ll make these lists into poetry in a moment. First, here’s a poem.

Poem: Love Letter to the Eve of the End of the World

Every generation has once considered themselves survivors 
At the end of a world. Doomsday clock. Nuclear count
-down. & the walls came tumbling. Unveiling of singe & gas
Chamber. Trench warfare. History, the body we slice through 
& never something to live in, to survive. How many times 
Have we assumed ourselves writing from Apocalypse & not 
Towards it? Modernity is a failed project, I type into the silicon
Expanse of my galaxy. If it would mean a return to a world 
Where we bury our dead whole, where light was not rewritten 
Into a night sky’s apology, where land was returned to only 
Land, like high-water returned to merely ocean, then, I beg,
Let us fall with the unquiet dead slaughtered by our own gas
-light: the flora wilting over the gazelle’s footprints, trailing 
To the edge of a cliff. Extinction where once was whole air. 
Do not mistake this for despair: the only way I can love 
The whole of us is to stare into the center of our unmaking
& learn to love the worlds made possible in our own fall. 
We can bend countries, like branches, until they break. Or
Sever, instead, the roots of the ever-knowing tree—the need 
For an ecosystem to call Eden. Elsewhere, a new history 
Of touch, not pitted against the land. Elsewhere, our teeth 
Sinking into the soft flesh of a fruit, without mourning.

I love the clarity in this poem—a clarity not only of our moment in history, but also of human psychology, and of hope sitting proverbially at the bottom of Pandora’s box. I also love the presence of “Eve” in the title—I read it to mean both the beginning of the end of the world, and the Eve of Adam’s rib in Eden.

This is a poem that stares at hopelessness and still manages finds hope. I think poetry is the best place for such a conundrum, in that poetry is much better suited at holding multiplicities and paradoxes. There are a few moment in this poem that felt like truths I couldn’t unsee:

• Every generation has once considered themselves survivors 
  At the end of a world.

What a bold opening line! It grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go. There’s a bittersweet comfort to this line. On the one hand, it’s evidence of our own likely survival; on the other hand, it’s a reminder that the apocalypse has happened many times over in human history.

• History, the body we slice through 
  & never something to live in, to survive. How many times 
  Have we assumed ourselves writing from Apocalypse & not 
  Towards it?

Boy, would I love to know the answer to this question. My gut tells me zero times, but then, plenty of literature came out of the end of WW2, so perhaps we are sandwiched between that coming and going throughout history—which this poem skillfully redefines.

• Do not mistake this for despair: the only way I can love 
  The whole of us is to stare into the center of our unmaking
  & learn to love the worlds made possible in our own fall. 

Who was it that said “the more I hate humans, the more I love humanity”? Someone said it, and I resonate with it more and more each day. I think this movement in the poem is more honest, though, and more nuanced: loving humanity means knowing the harm humanity can, and does, create, and learning to love both who we are and what we are possible of. In doing so, we acknowledge our capacity for good, too.

• Elsewhere, a new history 
  Of touch, not pitted against the land. Elsewhere, our teeth 
  Sinking into the soft flesh of a fruit, without mourning.

In defining “elsewhere,” this poem strives for it, too. No, we cannot escape history or mourning, but that doesn’t mean Eden, Utopia, or “the (actual) end of history” can’t be worked towards. Even if the work is asymptotic. Even if the dream is always Elsewhere.

What I come away from George Abraham’s glittering, clear-eyed poem is a renewed sense of place, both in history and in the present—and belief in the work of hope and of doing good, even when the work so often seems futile.

Prompt

Write a poem in which you stare down the list of things that make you feel hopeless. Choose to find hope. Try to subvert all of your expectations and familiar ways of thinking; use this poem as a space of empowerment, for yourself and for the world. 

Abrahams often juxtaposes different catastrophes in their poem, as well as different images of hope. Feel free to borrow that structure, or do something else with your lists, but refer back to them when you’re not sure where to look, whether that’s looking back or forward.