Hope is probably the single most important ingredient necessary to recover from grief and lead a full life once again -- the belief that you will recover from loss with new strengths and a new direction. It is the confidence that you will once again find peace and purpose, that your desires and aspirations will return, and that your “spark of life” will come back to you. Like faith, hope needs to be developed and cultivated. Sometimes it can seem that life will always feel as unbearable and painful as it does while you’re in the throes of your grief. Hope is the trust that something better lies on the road ahead of you, that there will be something to look forward to. The hopeful are the optimistic, only more so.
Hope is a complex positive emotion, uplifting by nature, that I feel is, in itself, inherently poetic. The heart and mind soar when we think about our aspirations. Desires and fresh directions in life lend themselves to poetic expression. The Google definition of hope is, “A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” It’s a wish, a plan, a dream, a longing, or a yearning. We must hold on to hope to live. It is our very souls, our life plans. Since there is no poetry without spirit, and hope is the heart of our spirit, then there is no poetry without hope.
When we write, we write about our dreams and yearnings in many cases. Those emotions are what make our poetry resonate with other people. Whether it is a longing that was unmet, or a life plan that never worked out, it is still about hope, either unrequited or realized.
Hope is a poetic concept in itself. A poem (and a person), that has no hope, no expectations, has no life. We must want something out of life in order to be fully alive. Otherwise what is there to write about? When I wrote my poetry, I was partially writing about the way I wanted things to be. I longed for my parents to return, I desired for something to happen. Without that yearning, the poems would be cold and without feeling. Hope makes us human and relatable to each other. It is a longing to get something out of our lives, and the expectation that we will. Without hope there is no growth or striving to become something in our lives. We would stand still and stagnate. We must believe in something, believe in ourselves, in order to progress.
Know that you can regain hope after a loss. It just takes time and work to recover. I found new meaning and direction in my life from writing after my parents died. My poems opened up a whole new world to me, one I never dreamed existed. I began to want things out of life again, to make dreams and plans. If you work at it, your dreams can come true.
As an exercise in writing a poem about hope, try this: make up a poem about something you expected or wanted to happen in your life that didn’t. Then rewrite that same poem with that same event, but this time it did happen. You can use any circumstances from your life here. As an example, maybe you expected to buy a house that you loved but the deal fell through at the last minute, and then the reverse: the deal came through and you now have your dream house! Write about that experience both ways. How do you feel about the house that never materialized for you (the ghost house)? How did you deal with the disappointment? Or how does the physical interior look to you now that you have what you desired? Does it live up to your expectations? Sometimes the joy is all in the desiring, but once you have the object of your desire, you may find you no longer want it. It can happen.
Or write about a wish you had in your youth, perhaps you wanted to marry but never did, or become a nurse, or have a child. Write what it was like to have those anticipated plans not realized, then rewrite with those plans realized. Use the senses of sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch in your poem. i.e. a nurse’s comforting reassuring touch and crisp white uniform. What was that replaced with when it never happened? Perhaps you wanted to comfort other people, but now are the one who needs comforting yourself. Write about that in a poem. Or just write a poem about the concept of hope in general and what it has meant to you in your life.
I suggest you begin with circumstances that aren’t around the death of your loved one, because that could be rather difficult to deal with at first. You can work up to that when you’re ready. I know I only want to remember the fulfilled expectations I had with my parents, the positive memories. And they really did fulfill all my expectations for my time with them. But you may not have had that good experience with your loved ones. This exercise does give you a more realistic view of what events in your life were really like, when you begin to write about both the unrealized and realized expectations for your life.
Hope is a beautiful, rhythmical, harmonious emotion -- something I believe we all possess deep down in our inner selves. It’s just that sometimes we have to work hard to bring it back up into our consciousness so it can benefit us in our day to day living. May you have hope renewed in your life, with many wonderful dreams and plans that you can still fulfill.
*Here are some wonderful hope poems to read by well-known writers.