Dreams before Waking

Despair is the question - Elie Wiesel

Hasta tu pais cambio. Lo has cambiado tu mismo. - Nancy Morejon

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter.

.

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

through the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

.

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

.

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal

flashing in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it's the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway -- wasn't she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash --

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

.

What will make it for you?

you don't want to know the stages

and those who go through them don't want to tell

You have your four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

you don't speak of despair.

.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other's despair into hope? --

You yourself must change it. --

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing? --

You yourself must change it. --

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it mean to stand on the first

page to the end of despair?

.