Hope Flashes

Jeff has been wirting poems this past year and lots of them have to do with our kids and being a dad. Here is one he wrote when we found out we were having our baby (Sam.)

I saw it!
It was just a tiny, little flash
on the edge of a square screen
in the doctor’s office –
but it was enough!

Enough to send heart racing
straight into throat
where any word that
even tries to escape
is suddenly lost
in a vacuum of ancestral gratitude,
making every hair on arm and neck
stand at complete attention
to wonder if the vision
is but an apparition
of the dream we no longer dream
in the daytime,
until it is finally confirmed
by the single bead of wetness
welled in the eye’s corner
that sweet, yet salty mixture
of an answered prayed
muddled with the memory of a mother
ten years gone
who holds the one baby
we never got to hold.

It was Hope that flashed on that screen today
and I’d recognize Her anywhere.
Her eyes dance with a wildness
that refuses to be tamed
pushing us to step
onto the step
that only appears
once…
it is stepped on.

Hope is the heart that beats
the pulsating potential
the one pregnant with possibility
unnamed and unknown
expect by the Source
that names and knows us all
and yet,
already loved in ways
that only the unspeakable
can measure.

And it doesn’t take much, does it?
Just a flash
a flicker
a glint
a tiny speck of light
on a sea of darkness
to open up the mind’s eye
to see the things
that simply were not
there just moments before
and yet somehow,
they must have always been.

And there on that screen
tucked within the twinkle
of this unborn hope
I saw gardens growing
in the opens spaces of the center city,
greening the places that
once burned in indifference.

And I saw the continent
that was Mother to us all
no longer left
to bury her babies –
dead from the disease
that dare not speak its name
but free to cultivate the culture
whose rhythms gives us
the syncopated space out of which
liberation
is born.

And for just a moment I swear to you
I saw Martin’s dream
and Rosa’s courage
and Bill W’s serenity
and glimpsed Theresa’s Calcutta
and witnessed Mandela emerge free from his cell
and watched as Hutus and Tutsis embrace
at the same time Israeli and Palestinian children
played on Jerusalem streets unafraid
while the single Chinese student stared
that rolling machinery of death
square in it’s eye and smiled
and when I listened closely,
over Coltrane’s unencumbered wailing
of “A Love Supreme,”
I heard the Galilean whisper
“Follow me.”

So as I stared at
the tiny, little flash
on the edge of a square screen
in the doctor’s office
I grab hold of the hand
of the one within whom
the flash now sleeps
and without saying a word
we pledge to this little light of ours
that we will do our best
to name it and know it and grow it
and love it
while promising never to try and tame it!

For we saw a little flash of hope today
And let me just say –
that was enough!