Hope in the Morning

I feel it first thing in the morning:
in the bubble and sparkle of early birdsong;

the play of light on the bedroom wall;
Luna the cat waiting by her bowl;

the tranquillity of tai chi;
reading words from our poetry community.

No radio or television, and no news.
Just a new day in all its hues.

I inhale a deep breath of hope before
I face the influx of despair once more.

Kim M. Russell, 29^th July 2026

It’s Wednesday and time to get together with those lovely poets at What’s Going On?, where we’re writing about hope with our host, Sherry, who was recently so struck by a line in a poem by Jane Hirshfield that she had to share it: “Hope is the hardest love we carry.”

She goes on to say that in “these times when there is so much outrageous suffering all over the world, our hearts are heavy with the wrongness of it.” Sherry reminds us that “it is because of love that we are hurting – love for this beautiful planet and all of our fellow beings –  Mother Earth showering us with starry skies and midnight moons even as the bombs are dropping and people whose mental faculties are alarming are making hugely consequential decisions, based on nothing at all.”

I love the two poems she gives us as inspiration, ‘Hope and Love’ by Jane Hirshfield and ‘The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road’ by Ada Limón, especially the heron’s “long neck folded, like a letter put away” and the thought of walking out into the woods and afterwards making toast in “sock feet, still damp from the fern’s wet grasp”.

Sherry would like us to contemplate hope in whatever way feels right to us, whether we are having trouble holding onto hope or that we have found ways to carry it, despite the evening news. She asks: Where do our hopes lie? How do we hold on to it in the maddest world we have ever known? She says that her method lies in Ada Limon’s closing lines: seeing those gifts, either around us or in memory, to “see the thing that makes it all better.”