Hope, a Myth Reawakened. Lillian Moats

she could resist no longer:

      epochs passed like this

      before she slumbered uninterruptedly.

      III. WHILE HOPE SLEPT, DESPAIR DID NOT

      While Hope slept, Despair did not—could not.

      No sooner had the Qualities dispersed

      through humankind than he detected

      the reasons for his existence.

      Greed, Enmity, Vindictiveness,

      like all the Qualities, appeared incarnate

      to Despair, though none of them shown bodily

      to men and women.

      He was drawn to the darker traits,

      not out of fellow feeling, but from a need to witness

      all the threats to humankind.

      His brow, already furrowed when he fled the jar,

      in time grew rutted by vigilance,

      his mouth drawn with dread, his eyelids weighty,

      as if they wanted nothing more than to close,

      but could not.

      Despair saw all the sorrow he was meant to see.

      Yet even he was fooled by two Qualities

      pretending to be Hope,

      so that he felt, but gave no credence to,

      her absence.

      The instant the lid of the urn had lifted,

      before the Qualities could divide into personae,

      a trace of the All-in-All escaped.

      Not only were hints of greed, enmity, vindictiveness

      dispersed in this mix,

      but tinctures of empathy, compassion and even hope.

      No sooner had the myth of the gift from the gods

      become widely told than it inspired in humans

      a longing for the imprisoned Hope.

      Envious, two lesser Qualities began to pose as she.

      They were Wishful Thinking and Blind Faith.

      The gods, who had devised the Qualities,

      have long since died,

      and others come and gone in human minds.

      But Faith leapt from one clique of deities

      to another, and then to one god

      in many guises,

      and even to demagogues

      who promised the impossible.

      Faith’s message was always the same:

      “I am your Hope. Believe in me.”

      Seemingly innocent,

      the ever present Wishful Thinking, too,

      usurped my mother’s name,

      which became so commonplace

      that who could have known

      true Hope was still imprisoned?