Scientists Confirm Hope Takes Practice
A cento comprised of titles
Dear America,
What you have heard is true. There is no finished world,
no country for old men. I curse the river of time,
the hormone of darkness. Mad honey hustle becoming
a fort made of doors, a field guide to getting lost.
Ask me how to dance as the roof caves in. Ask me
before I burn the sky above the roof, still falling.
Silence is my mother tongue, mother country,
echoland. Pity the beautiful American masculine,
raised by wolves, crying at the movies, beachcombing
for a shipwrecked god. You don’t have to say
you love me, America. But why not? I blaze
because of you, as if grief is the thing with feathers.
Strange as this weather has been, I just lately started
buying wings. Even now, the heyday
of the insensitive bastards, it’s okay that you’re not okay.
Dark days hold everything: the book
of not dreaming, the wind that lays waste,
the life of an unknown man.
Ask me how to escape from a leper colony.
Sometimes I think about it in times of fading light.
Lessons on expulsion. Let evening come.
You can never chart your own destiny, as if
luck is luck. When all else fails, pause, traveler,
hold fast to the bright edge of the world.
Let me tell you what I can’t bear losing.
One thing after another. Seeds, winter twigs,
barkskins. Exploring the seashore, tasting the sky,
light entering my bones. Come and see
the art of daring. This is me letting you go,
America. And yet, I’ll never give up on you.
Do you want to know what I carry still? Stupid hope,
natural grace, the solace of stones. The blinding
bright stain in the spaces between us. All the light
we cannot see. In other words, an immense world.
I am, I am, I am
the luckiest scar on earth.
Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath, 2024), and the memoir Learning to Spar, due out in 2026 from Unsolicited Press. When not writing or serving as editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press, Jill can be found hovering over a tide pool or trekking down a trail.
Read, view, and listen to more poetry by Jill McCabe Johnson appearing in Terrain.org: “Dear World,” a Letter to America poem; three poems; three other poems; and “Orca Coronary Chamber,” a video poem by Corinne Duchesne, Garrett Hope, and Jill McCabe Johnson.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Aneta Rog, courtesy Pixabay.
