Enter the poet: HOPE

Every activist needs a poet. Very few are poets; certainly I’m not; I don’t sit still long enough; my powers of observation are limited. Like chess, I find poetry overly demanding of my short social media-distracted attention span. To engage poetry I must concentrate: Read the text out loud, several times if necessary; savour the sound, the rhythm, let the scansion carry me away to places known and unknown. Allow myself to be arrested—by a new word, a surprising reaction, a different allusion.

Well-crafted poetry is hard work for both poet and audience. In an article in the Washington Post Harvard University sophomore Diane Sun writes “poetry is supposed to take effort” a quality not found in AI generated verses. “Poets travel the nooks and crannies of their brains, negotiating their lived experiences, their sparks of inspiration and their heartfelt emotions.” “Poetry is meaningful because it is art created through adversity, from the unpredictable and unanticipated.” Again, hard work.

Some poems are more worthwhile than others. Think of T S Eliot, Emily Dickenson, and John Milton. Then there’s Amanda Gordon’s The Hill We Climb shared at the Biden/Harris inauguration. In a similar spirit, the poem below by Salome Agbaroji is worth a careful read.

The performance context is worth mentioning, Davos, Switzerland, the annual gathering of the rich and famous decision and deal makers of a waning global capitalist elite who find themselves shrinking from an influence once enjoyed prior to the inauguration of the US federal felon who feeds the next generation of corporate oligarchs. Now the man who didn’t even attend Davos is the constant centre of conversation, the one around whom everything and everyone currently swirls.

Here is her poem. Enjoy:

HOPE 
by Salome Agbaroji

When I was ye high,
My hopes were way higher.
Inspired by the fairytales
And princess dress attire.

If you just believe, they said,
Everything bleak becomes beautiful,
The pebbles become pearls and
We all get our happy endings.

But when I outgrew those glass slippers,
I saw no hope on our screens,
In the children’s screams.
As the story unfolds more smoke unfurls and

All of a sudden I’m that child again
Tugging at the pant leg of History
Asking, “is there more to the story
Or is happily ever after only a thing of fiction?”

But then I remember
The hero’s journey is long and hard
And always only won in the final act.
And the valiant protagonist of this epic called “Earth”
Is named HOPE.

But this HOPE isn’t the idle optimist
That sits on stumps plucking petals.
Instead, we are getting our hands dirty
And planting the seeds ourselves.

This HOPE isn’t wishing on a lucky star.
It is imagining a future where stars are visible in the first place
Past the clouds of CO2 we struggle seeing through.

In this story,
Women across the globe are their own knights in shining armour,
or presidents or bankers, or mothers or farmers.

HOPE is a call to the unseen
And a claim to what’s yet to be.
HOPE is the hero we need.

I’m not concerned
With whether you call it a glass half full or a glass half empty.
This HOPE is ensuring there is clean water in that glass
Today, tomorrow, and every tomorrow after that.

We are not kissing lucky quarters
And throwing them into wishing wells.
We are convening in common quarters
To protect and preserve health and wellness.

This is the difference between a wish and a goal.
We do not seek magic potions or genies in bottles,
We exercise our devotion with potential at full throttle.

With 5 years left,
Marvel at the mountains we scaled,
The dragons we’ve slain,
Remember that the sweetest victories
Are the ones with the buzzer-beater turnarounds,
When the hero
On the lowest bars of health
Falls face-to-face with certain defeat,
But with faith, rises to their feet
And fights on.

HOPE is not the way that we cope,
But the way that we conquer.
So this year and beyond,
We aren’t crossing our fingers,
We’re crossing finish lines.

Let’s write a finale worthy of applause
Because every life on this planet
Has its own narrative
Worthy and deserving
Of its own happily ever after.

Read the full article including the text from Alastair Campbell here.