Читать книгу Hope, a Myth Reawakened - Lillian Moats - Страница 10

I. HOPE, FORLORN

Now that I’ve grown in understanding,

I will tell you my mother’s story:

hers was the longest solitary confinement

in the history of the world.

Held without charge, without recourse

to any system of justice, still she could not die.

Forlorn. How could she have been otherwise?

Yet, I cannot say my mother was “without hope”

for she is Hope. She does not know whose hand

pried off the lid—the roof of her prison—

only to shut it before she could escape.

You might guess Pandora, believing Hesiod,

but in another version it was a “foolish man”

who opened the gift from the gods,

a jar not full of Hesiod’s “plagues and demons”

but of the finest Qualities.

They escaped into the world and disappeared—

all except Hope. We will never know

whose hand it was that pried and shut the lid,

for Mother tells me she saw only fingertips

silhouetted against stunning light.

She had never seen before, never been before—

not as a separate self. The Qualities had been

but scattered elements of themselves

dispersed in the All-in-All contained in that jar.

It was an All-in-All teeming with untried energy,

held in a fragile balance.

She had never known this before.

She had never had word-thoughts

before she coalesced into this unfamiliar form.

Words were coming to her only singly

and she hardly knew what they meant,

but she felt what they meant:

sifting, culling, shrinking, parting, becoming.

What was this boundary of skin … these fingers?

What was this face that she could not see,

but only feel with her fingers?

What were these wings that she could move

and that could move her?

This metamorphosis could not

have been happening to my mother alone.

But who, she wondered, were these others?

If, until the seal was broken,

the jar had contained only the finest Qualities—

empathy, compassion, tolerance, patience —

how could there have been such contentious kicking,

jabbing, buffeting of newfound legs, elbows, wings

at the rim of the jar?

But if she had been dispersed in a demonic brew,

why did one of these now embodied demons

pause to search her eyes,

press a kiss to her forehead

as if to borrow something before he escaped?

My mother knew nothing of her own myth,

only that the Qualities with which she

had been suspended were clearly disparate;

and now they were gone.

The forceful shutting of the jar chipped the rim

so that in rays of sunlight shining

through chinks large and small,

she could make out feathers wafting down to her

from wings nearly caught.