Yay, A Poem!

We finally began reading poetry in my AP English class! We are assigned a poem to read every day. Most of the other kids in my class hate poetry, and think I'm nuts because I do. I decided that if I like the poem I'm going to post it here so you can read it, too. The best part of all this is that reading poetry will probably inspire me to write again.

Hope

by Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners before the lights are turned on, it shakes sleep from its eyes and drops from mushroom gills, it explodes in the starry heads of dandelions turned sages, it sticks to the wings of green angels that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye of the many-eyed potato, it lives in each earthworm segment surviving cruelty, it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog, it is the mouth that inflates the lungs of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves, the argument that refutes death, the genius that invents the future, all we know of God. It is the serum which makes us swear not to betray one another; it is in this poem, trying to speak.