Steadfast

STEADFAST

Pushing back against despair,

A part of me still hopes for better days.

Surely, it’s still coming- I’ve been waiting for so long.

Even when it seems utterly foolish, I hold onto hope.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d missed it somehow,

Like an exit that came up too fast-

And I was there, but I was in the wrong lane.

Now I’m watching it get smaller and smaller in my mirror.

The long summer when I was 19, I almost gave up.

My dad had a gun in his underwear drawer-

I don’t know if it was loaded,

But I knew it was there.

It scared me, those thoughts.

I felt like I had lost myself,

I couldn’t find the hope I’d clung to-

Don’t even know when or where I had dropped it off.

Music saved me then-the songs I played on my borrowed guitar.

It wasn’t fancy, and I wasn’t even that good.

But the beautiful notes resonating against my chest

Was peace.

I lost myself again before my marriage ended.

Was I doomed to repeat my father’s life?

God, I just want to go home.

Can I please just come Home?

Firm and unwavering, Hope lurked in the weeping part of my soul.

Pushy, insolent, impertinent, she just wouldn’t go away.

“What if?” she asked, “Why not? Maybe your story is not yet bound off.”

“There are new exits coming up- what if?”

I take a deep breath as I drive, fingers of one hand playing with the air.

Wind was rustling the little hairs around my face,

Turning towards the morning sun, I greet my old friend Hope.

She’s steadfast, that one.

TMD 4/17/24

30-day poems with @beausia