I Do Not Fear A Season Without Hope

I do not fear a season without hope:
Catastrophe upon catastrophe,
When love is every day a little bit
Made more a crime. When cruelty becomes
The only virtue men know how to praise.
When all but easy speeches are forbid
To comfort cruel men. I do not fear
The very nearing chance that any day
May be the day I go to meet my gods
And this, the only life I’ll ever have,
Comes to an end. And no more do I fear
The fear that any season without hope
Must needs be lived under and underneath.
Awake with fear, washing fear, dressing fear,
Breaking my fast with fear, reading of fear
And hearing of it every long, long hour
Before I go to bed with fear again.
I do not fear the man I must become
To survive any season without hope.
I have been him before. I lived long years
Before I ever learned the taste of hope.
Determination in despair is hell,
But still, a hell whose territory I know
By memory. I know how comfortable
I can myself make there: not very much,
But still, enough to last until the day
When I know how to walk the way back out.
But oh, I fear the shock of hope again
When does this season pass at weary last.
How fragile does determination grow,
How crusted, crystalized, and corroded,
When for a season soaks it in despair?
The lightest touch sufficeth then to break.
How can I tell, when hope returns at last
That all my bones and soul, long used to weight,
Will not with the too sudden lightening
Of burdens, shatter? Scatter into dust?
Thus do I fear a season without hope,
Lest by surviving I become unfit
To live, when hope is possible again.