For a couple of years – from its provenance somewhere in the quietest part of lockdown – I’ve been moving this poem towards a final draft. Paul Valéry (apocryphal?) tells us that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. So as these pixels embed themselves, here I go, off into the mystic!

HOPE SPRINGS

When Pandora opened the lid
of the box, hope alone in
quiet defiance hid beneath the rim.

And then grown bolder
she tucked in her shabby lot
with the dust and destruction

and blew out into the world.
I met her in a strip-lit corridor.
She looked pale – more patient

than doctor. Strange that here
between the hand-wash stations
and the drug cupboards hope

should look so hollow-eyed.
The lights too harsh?
Or the expectations too high?

Hope was one before me
in the checkout queue.
So sad her choices, scattered

like bewildered strangers
finding themselves unaccountably
in the same place. Quick-fix items

for a moment’s solace, sugar-heavy,
full of shallow promises. And that
newspaper, the bigot’s almanac,

with its what about who and where
and why folded like sweepings
into its temporary sheets.

As for me, sometimes it seems
that hope is a vapour caught inside
my clothes. I catch its tang as

old-time barroom fag smoke, a
miasma I trail in spite of myself.
So I stand upwind of stiff breezes,

or where the pavement airshaft
lifts it inside sterilising steam
past the balconies, past the windows,

past the rooftops. But for others
it’s like some weird cologne; they turn
as I pass and follow in my slipstream.

We fashion in such moments
a chain of dreamtime links, rattling
our reckless certainty through

the halls and corridors, the bedrooms
and the cloisters, the wards and cells,
the arrival and departure lounges.

Hope as phantom, hope as
hive-mind murmur, hope as
marsh-gas. Hope is, in truth,

a tumour close to the heart,
inaccessible to the stoical
surgeons with their probes

and spatulas. It feeds at the
fuse-point of the white and red,
the coming in, the passing out.

And even when it seems
as though for you a night sky
like no other shuts down your light

into itself as if the stars themselves
are going out, hope will metastasise.
It animates electrolytes; it floods

your wilderness of roots and shoots:
it melts the filaments of heartbreak
and despair. Hope has you at your

open window, watching the black
smoke rising in spite of the rain.
Hope has you at the garden gate

whilst beyond they’re beating down
the bracken and the brambles.
Hope has you wedged between

your shrinking bones, wrapped
inside the shabby folded leaves
that are now your skin, and you

still vigilant for the turned key.
the arcing door, the ticket-of-leave,
and the steady light beyond.