What Waiting Means

27 August 2025

https://poems.culturing.net/2025/08/what-waiting-means/

It was a strange invitation, wrapped in metaphor,
baked in a poet's heart. But the heat of that heart
is untrustworthy, cannot be turned on by choice.
So I capture its moments in words, hoping you
dear reader may just for a moment remember me
not as I was, but as I wanted to be.

--

There is no kiln to light. The embers dwindle, and I
am alone with my darkest parts. Who's to say whether
life is mistaken in a fundamental way, whether we
are tossed hopeless by waves of chaos and change
regardless of choices made? Who'd want more?
Who would pass on the cycle to new generations, just to watch
as they also flounder? What hope can this cure?
There is no fire either, just stories of fire, the memories
of what worked before. There is only the loneliest path,
the one I know better than life itself, the one that leads
into oblivion.

--

But then light comes, that staggering light,
which illumines this darkest of nights. I'm alive.
And how can this be? How can such things be?
Every heartbeat an indecipherable miracle, each breath
the spirit of God (come again to remind me
how so unlike churches he is), and I wonder
what place I might have in this universe
pulsing with life, which is brimful of folly and pain
but also unquenchable hope.

--

My place is to write this down, to record
what has been, so that others will know, so that some few will see
what could be, and to you who believe, I say:
let us be free. It is never too late to begin.
You must look first within, where your fire is undoubtable.
Then use that flame to light torches that guide the way.
There will be some who fear that your candle
is meant to destroy, who will snuff it if given the choice.
You must burn all the hotter to melt their instruments,
to singe any wind that dares to extinguish the flame.
But of course, you already know this. In fact,
you could do no other. Your eyes tell me so.

--

But those eyes are not candid. They bear not
the full imprimatur of truth. They are under construction.
They lack what suffices: eternal fuel, the wax
of forever and always, to bind that flame to its holder,
to make sense of flame itself, and to carry the warmth
that is so sorely needed. What then? Can we call to it,
summon with words to forsaken spaces that essence
that once, and again, and forever ignites its very self
in a panoply of dazzling colors and lights? Would that do?
Or must we wait for another?

--

We must wait for another, but which one
we never can (cannot yet) say. That is what waiting means.
Until then, be at peace, if you can.