the crane flies calmly through the night;
the hummingbird, tethered to nectar for flight.
i have no hope she will change her ways,
choosing lies and chemicals over intimacy,
severing friends and family,
to avoid locking eyes
with the coward in her mirror.
i have no hope she will apologize
for using me,
for fooling me into enabling her decay,
for pretending she saw a future in me,
while hiding who she was.
i have no hope she’ll ever see
how deeply i loved,
how deeply she wounded,
how her silences and masks
made me feel small.
i have no hope that i’ll see my old friend,
or make up for lost years,
or trust in love,
or come to the end
of this migration.
i have no hope of crossing this ocean,
of rising air to lift my burdens,
of storms allowing my passage,
of remembering the stars,
and finding my way back to them.
the charismatic hummingbird cons (bright, brief),
and i remain the crane…
patient, enduring, moment by moment,
flying alone through the quiet night.
Insight: Letting go of hope means surrendering the illusion that something must change in order for the heart to awaken. “No hope” does not mean change is impossible, for everything flows. Rather, it is the release of demanding reality to conform to desire. It is not stagnation, nor the fixed view of giving up, but a clarity that emerges when we stop grasping for things to be otherwise.
This poem draws imagery from the traditional Cherokee story, “The Hummingbird and the Crane”, as preserved by the Cherokee Nation.
Image credit: Taken at Greater Rann of Kutch (9 December 2016), UdayKiran28.
Primitive Joe 
