I needed a poem

It occurs to me
that there were poems I needed
but couldn’t find in time.
I needed them to tell me
that the world is spinning
and so is everything on it,
which means that being grounded
means being in motion, too.

I needed them to tell me
that thinking I could convince
someone, anyone - you - to love me
was an insult to them
but most importantly
an insult to myself.

I needed a poem that reminded me
of the dizzying size of the universe.
To remember in times of triumph
and in deep, breath-stealing grief,
how much more - how much, much more -
there is of planets and light and magnetism
and gas and nebula than there is of me.
I needed that not so I could feel small,
but so I could feel like a pulsing
miracle.

I needed to know that grace,
for all its luster,
should be shown to myself
as much as to the people
who maybe did or maybe didn’t
deserve the grace I extended to them,
and that showing more grace
than someone deserved
was always the only way home to myself.

A treatise, a dissertation, a scribbled scrawled line -
anything at all that told the truth
about hope.
I needed to know that hope is not,
is definitely not, some hidden plot
that brings goodness and joy, but only
if you summon it in the right,
very secret, ancient way.

No: Hope is the dance between
everything and nothing;
it is the truth of odds playing out,
all around us, all the time.
If something can happen, eventually, it will.
Even the good things. Even, yes,
the breath-stealing beautiful things.
And hope is not blind faith that
good is possible; hope is knowing
that I won’t get to see these
majestic, improbable, and yet still possible
pearls of circumstance, if I don’t
stick around for them.
Hope is not the reason I persevere-
hope is the act of perseverance,
and what’s delightful about realizing this
is that there’s a bit of delicious defiance
in hope, too.

Fuck ‘em.

This is the poem I needed.
Maybe you do, too.