A Poem for The Days

There’s just too many words right now. As the days wear on (we’re now in week 10 of quarantine in Maine), there’s an endless stream of advice, opinions, theological arguments… there’s no shortage of diatribes about isolation or quarantine, reopening and reintegrating, making the best of these days or feeling desperate, about the end of days and heresies. It’s exhausting. It seems to be a distracting swirl of contradiction. While I grapple to make sense of most things, I just can’t right now. And I am generally a lover words and reason.

Mary Oliver said: “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

So instead of lofty thoughts and wordy ideas, I’ve returned to my first & most elementary form of writing- poetry. It’s my loaves & fishes in this time, where survival & grief coexist. 

Hope- by Jessica Briggs
Hope is a whisper-
God is here.

Near. 
With. 
In grief
In confusion
In failure 

He’s not in some lofty place
Full of choirs
Gilded with worship

Immanuel lives in my grief
For the thing I can’t even
Speak about
Think about
Understand

He is Light-life

Hope is a candle
And I am the darkness.