it's quiet outside the apartment,
save for the wind in the budding trees
& the scuffle of cars as they rush
home on the midnight freeway.
the sirens have gone silent
as if they were frightened children
whose nightmares have abated
for now. one might be forgiven for thinking
there's not a disease silently claiming lives
past the dark houses & branches.
but there's a kind of hope
to be found in this, maybe:
a reminder of a peace
that once was and will come again.
it's the kind of hope
when you give weakened plants
fresh soil & splashes of water
& find them upright,
eagerly waiting to drink
the next day;
the kind of hope
when you watch cardinals
sing & soar in the Sunday sun,
chasing one another,
driven by the invisible gravity of attraction;
the kind of hope
when strangers tell you "stay healthy"
& mean it, when nurses, doctors,
& EMTs are thanked
from a distance on street-corners;
the kind of hope
when the Statue of Liberty,
though seemingly tiny
from a quiet Park Slope hill,
gleams out on the dark harbor;
the kind of hope
when you learn that a friend
bed-stricken & on the cusp
of a gasping death
is speaking again;
the kind of hope
found in a photograph
of a ninety-year-old grandmother
making face-masks from cloth-scraps
& old shirts pressed to new use
by the weight of a hot iron.
that kind of hope sings
like a sewing machine
dusted off & pushing forward
for the first time in years:
a steady, surging pulse
of unflappable life
in a time of sorrow.