Poetry: The Meaning of Hope by Ted Mc Carthy

Photo by Vincent Giersch on Unsplash

The year like all else
is on the turn. Spring carries
a sharpness like that behind the eyes
after sleeplessness. Everything within
should be like the wind, honed,

but in too long a wintering, unexercised,
the senses have coalesced to a weight
that drives you to walk and wonder

was there a chance to do better?
I recall children on their first day at school,
their faces glowing or freighted
with the burden of a life not yet lived.
How much of it all was fate?

The playground is grass, the walls’
swimming-pool blue is simply sky now,
open, grey, gentle on the odd day.

And those years, their tiny thousand
tumults, are a tinnitus merged
with the memory of greater joys and ills;
old joys which never come
unbidden—they must be grafted, grasped,

invented even, like that perfect
room you conjured once, in which
to puzzle the meaning of home.

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada, and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding, and Beverly Downs. His work can be found on http://www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com