Hope

This line from September, the First Day of School by Howard Nemerov:

“I know my hope, but do not know its form.”

True, no? I have in my mind what hope, or distress, or success, or failure… would feel or look like. I have formed some mental concept of what form they might take in a given circumstance, what might be “good” and what might be “bad.”. Yet what I have in my mind is nothing more than that, a concept, a thought, my own mental construct. I create those despite my experiennce that life constantly surprises me in its delivery. Sometimes “failure” has arrived looking like “success,” or as often, “success” arrives looking like “failure.”

“I know my hope, but do not know its form.”