Another Poem for the Christmas Season: Hope

      Hope
Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
     it shakes sleep from its eyes
     and drops from mushroom gills,
          it explodes in the starry heads
          of dandelions turned sages,
               it sticks to the winds of green angels
               that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of many-eyed potato,
     it lives in each earthworm segment
     surviving cruelty,
          it is the motion that runs
          from the eyes to the tail of a dog,
               it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
               of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another,
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

[found in Keillor, Garrison. Good Poems. Penguin, 2002. 224]