It’s the hope that kills you – a general election poem

It really is

It’s that you allowed yourself to believe

You dared yourself to dream that things may be different

That we could ask for more than the slow cancellation of our future

That we could strive for a world worth living in for the many

Not just the few

And you didn’t think that you were asking for much

Naively, arrogantly, you thought you could win on the strength of an argument

And now

You’re curled up on your bed waiting for the exit polls

Your hair still wet from canvassing in the rain and you don’t know

If it is your heart or your soul that breaks

But as the world breaks so do you you shatter

You thought you were prepared for defeat but you weren’t

You were not prepared for how that traitor hope set you up

Made you fall from such a greater height

You were not prepared for how hope would break you

Maybe

It would’ve been easier

If you’d resigned yourself earlier

Had let yourself be seduced by the siren song of Realism

the strange comfort of accepting that nothing you will ever do

Will Make A Difference

And that while doom will come to your doorstep eventually

You have a while yet

And while you watch others freeze in our parks and die at out borders

You can comfort yourself in your own powerlessness as you avert your eyes.

But even as hope slips through your fingers

Dissolving like so much smoke you realise

That hope

Was always a sufficient but never a necessary condition to spur you into action

That hope will power you but so will rage

So will love

And if nothing else is left, duty

Because politics is not a game you cannot rage quite

The future

Even at your lowest, your hair now wet from tears as well as the rain

That rained on you when you were canvassing in another life

You know that hope was always a choice rather than a fact

That you don’t choose to fight because you think you will win but because you must

That even if nothing you do will ever make a difference

And you fail every battle there might yet come a time you win

And maybe the arrogance lies not in thinking you can make a difference

But in assuming you can tell the future

Assuming you have the right to give up

When the stakes are so high

And you don’t know if you are brave enough

If you are strong enough

For the battles that have yet to be fought

But you know you are strong enough to get up tomorrow morning to start over

You are brave enough for this

You are brave enough to shatter your heart a thousand times

You are brave enough to chose hope

Written by Grace Krause, December 2019

follow me on Twitter @thegracek