{"sf1_id":1695976,"sf2_id":"Vm2PQW1x","title":"I Do Not Fear A Season Without Hope","author":"Rob MacWolf","words":301,"posted_at":"2021-03-15T21:27:00.000Z","tags":["Autobiographical","Poetry","blank verse"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1695976-i-do-not-fear-a-season-without-hope","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/Vm2PQW1x","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/41/51/41518078-4a04-4ce0-a6a5-550e26c7b17b","description":"#7 of poetry\n\nWrote this at the beginning of the pandemic. Still waiting on the results, honestly.","content":"I do not fear a season without hope:\n\nCatastrophe upon catastrophe,\n\nWhen love is every day a little bit\n\nMade more a crime. When cruelty becomes\n\nThe only virtue men know how to praise.\n\nWhen all but easy speeches are forbid\n\nTo comfort cruel men. I do not fear\n\nThe very nearing chance that any day\n\nMay be the day I go to meet my gods\n\nAnd this, the only life I'll ever have,\n\nComes to an end. And no more do I fear\n\nThe fear that any season without hope\n\nMust needs be lived under and underneath.\n\nAwake with fear, washing fear, dressing fear,\n\nBreaking my fast with fear, reading of fear\n\nAnd hearing of it every long, long hour\n\nBefore I go to bed with fear again.\n\nI do not fear the man I must become\n\nTo survive any season without hope.\n\nI have been him before. I lived long years\n\nBefore I ever learned the taste of hope.\n\nDetermination in despair is hell,\n\nBut still, a hell whose territory I know\n\nBy memory. I know how comfortable\n\nI can myself make there: not very much,  \nBut still, enough to last until the day\n\nWhen I know how to walk the way back out.\n\nBut oh, I fear the shock of hope again\n\nWhen does this season pass at weary last.\n\nHow fragile does determination grow,\n\nHow crusted, corroded, and crystallized,\n\nWhen for a season soaks it in despair?\n\nThe lightest touch sufficeth then to break.\n\nHow can I tell, when hope returns at last\n\nThat all my bones and soul, long used to weight,\n\nWill not with the too sudden lightening\n\nOf burdens, shatter? Scatter into dust?\n\nThus do I fear a season without hope,\n\nLest by surviving I become unfit\n\nTo live, when hope is possible again.\n\n  \n  \n\n","series":{"name":"poetry","previous":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1695969-maybe-all-confessional-essays-should-be-written-in-blank-verse.json","next":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1695980-i-ask-myself-how-is-it-i-have-come.json"}}