Hodgepodge 11/365 - Poetry (Mark Doty)

My heart is heavy this morning, the 9th of November, 2016—the day after we learned that Donald Trump will be our 45th president. I fear many things under his so-called leadership. But I don't want to dwell in the fear, the dismay. I don't want to fall into despair.

So I turned to poetry, and here's the first poem I found that touched the right mood. I think I will be turning to poetry more often this next while, saving out the ones that do what I need: give me hope and courage.

Long Point Light

Long Point's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,

and the square white
of the lighthouse—separated
     from us
by the bay's ultramarine

as if it were nowhere
we could ever go—gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing

into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.

It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I think
it's the where-we-will be,
only not yet, like some visible outcropping

of the afterlife. In the dark
its deeper invitations emerge:
green witness at night's end,

flickering margin of horizon,
marker of safety and limit.
But limitless, the way it calls us,

and where it seems to want us
to come. And so I invite it
into the poem, to speak,

and the lighthouse says:
Here is the world you asked for,
gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide,
and a glinting code: promise and warning.
The morning's the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

                              —Mark Doty