Freshly Fallen Hope

[This poem was inspired by a photograph of a fresh snowfall at dusk taken by a friend and is the final poem in the quadrilogy.  I have learned the hard way that sometimes redemption is found not in the grandiose overnight revolutions we so much long for as in a miracle but in the revelations of a new beginning born of a sublimely quiet hope arriving like a freshly fallen snow.  Here the phrase “freshly fallen hope” is used both to portray a hope fallen to its death as the longing was left unfulfilled as well as the inverse of God birthing a new hope to continue on despite the heart-shattering disappointment experienced.  Snow is used both as symbolic of the beginning of a winter of disappointment but also as a new beginning as God starts to redeem perhaps the most bombastic and overwhelming pain- that of a freshly broken heart.]

Another day’s breathing
Exhausted
But not exempt
Another day’s labors
Spent
Trying to outrun
The steps behind me.

Another night’s thoughts
Lonely and falling
On every side
Another night’s demands
Playing seek and hide,
Trying to redefine me.

So long ago
Patience forgot my name,
But never the pain
As dreams became
Mere memories
Failing like the rain.

Nothing
And everything
Was my fault.

Nothing
And everything
Was my fall.

Fenced in
By the whispers
Of conviction
I screamed for freedom
Amidst the noise
Of too many choices,
Too much chaos,
And too few benedictions.

I planted my stake
With all the fortitude
I could claim
And set my face
Like a flint
Against the shame.

My hopes,
Often so silent
Yet ever insistent,
Me endured
Hour upon hour
Month after month
Fighting all the odds
Like soldiers
During the war of revolution.

Yet they became
Nothing
More than fodder
For the triumphant scoffers
In all their power so delirious
Mocking all I had offered,
Everything I held true and serious
And the strength
That once
Fueled my resolutions.

Left empty of hope
And nearly freezing
From the silencing
Of the incandescent beckoning
I became deaf
To all other pleadings
Never so pleasing.

My own mercy forsaken
I had no choice
But to kneel
To keep breathing
To yield my voice
To anything beyond
The wantonness and hurting.

My sight blinded
By the wind and confusion
I staggered like a man
Drunken on disillusion
At his wit’s end
Far from Heaven.

Yet I was sustained
Again and again
By a grain of faith
In the shadows
Of a mountain of grace
Pouring down an avalanche
Of forgiveness
During the endless
Night of reckoning.

Finally running out of time
My defenses
Surrendered to the joy
Of a Spirit
Stronger than mine
Overtaken
By the redemption
Of a freshly fallen hope,
As quiet as a freshly fallen snow,
And breathed in deeply
A final new beginning
Knowing no longer the desperation
And wrath
Of an abandoned haven
But the path and purpose to be trod
To a much more permanent
And ever more sublime destination.