Letter to the Editor - 5-23-24

After a Cricket

Hope holds despair as much as despair holds hope.

Despair has to keep hope out of mind somewhere,

like that fine-tooth strumming I heard over lunch

from what couldn’t have been a cricket. It was

too cold in the fall, too sunny in the day. Hope—

hard hope—doesn’t tune out but listens

through despair for sounds of life.

For the foreseeable century, the climate will gleam on us,

with a fixed gleam that breaks down anywhere at once,

as any expression will if it’s held too long.

Over lunch the next day I heard the same sound.

So I went outdoors and followed the strumming to what,

sure enough, was a cricket, running one forewing

down the other, somewhere in the noonday shade

of the braided wisteria vine in pod. I felt his strumming

deepened the shade he basked in. But I knew

he wasn’t playing for me or only to please himself.

The next day, nothing. So I went out and I listened

to a silence in the shape of a strum.

The strummer, I like to think, hadn’t given out

but met up with an admirer.

His hope would have held. He played

like it would never have occurred to him

to stop before he was done.

John Shoptaw

From a new collection, Near-Earth Object, published by Unbound Edition Press (Atlanta, Georgia)