Hope Is The Thing That Knows

Jodi Vandenberg-Davies

Hope is the thing that knows

What we cannot know.

It’s a pandemic spring in Wisconsin.

The floods came last time the earth spun this way,

And they receded. 

The political apocalypse arrived years ago now,

smudging all that we had written.

Nothing was engraved, it turns out.

Change exposes all that we thought we knew.

I feel the soft earth under my feet this morning

On the marsh running trail.

Yesterday the earth felt so vulnerable.

Now, as a scourge of death and disease

Passes among us humans,

The earth resonates like a solid home,

Away from the sidewalks and streets

A bed of sticks and dormant grass holds me up.

Throaty voices of the geese pierce the grey and insist on spring.

Bold blue jay’s colors shout against the misty, distant sun.

Snow is forced back by warm circles of tree trunks.

Ice is mottled, ridged, patched, thin and fraying

Or thick and angry white-grey, riddled with snow.

And then it’s water and the sky is kissing it

Sharp red lines of leafless bushes line the water’s edge

Vines curlicue up and around sister trees.

Everything is embracing everything else

What do we ever know about who or what is fragile?

Jodi Vandenberg-Daves is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the author of Modern Motherhood:  An American History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), various other academic publications, and a self-published collection of poetry, Poems in the Mother Tongue.