Poetry | World Poetry Day

Hope in a Twittle

~ or three ~ and gratitude too

Is it a case of hope or greed that has some people pining for more than they need? There’s a fine line ‘tween hoping and whining

If hope is a candle lit for yourself not a blessing upon another, the poles of self-love ’n’ selfishness fade ’n’ merge together

If hope is an act all about me take a moment to reflect on your mood because the flip side of hope isn’t despair, it’s gratitude

© Carolyn Hastings 2021

I’ve been thinking about the person I wrote about a few days ago in my hope sonnet — a writer who’d been beating her head up against the metaphorical brick wall and despairing that her work would never be recognised. I think a lot of writers would relate to those feelings at some point in their writing career. It’s completely understandable. It’s so demoralising to have busted your guts to produce your best work to then watch helplessly as it plummets into the black hole of oblivion the instant it’s released to the world. It had me thinking how inherently self-centred, even selfish, that attitude can be and how easy it is to allow yourself to wallow in self-pity. And how useless — fruitless — it is to hold that view for longer than, let’s say, a few minutes.

It occurred to me that the issue lies in the words themselves — not the writer’s words but the words, ‘hope’ and ‘despair’. Look up any dictionary and you’ll see that ‘despair’ is defined in terms of ‘utter loss of hope’ or ‘hopelessness’. It follows that the opposite of ‘despair’ is ‘hope’. By accepting these definitions, we’re effectively giving ourselves permission to despair when we perceive all hope has been lost. We’re allowing ourselves to be our own victims.

And then I got thinking about a wonderful prose poem I read earlier in the week — K. Barrett’s, I Choose Gratitude. In it, Kara writes -

‘Gratitude makes everything better.’

Gratitude.

Gratitude. That’s the switch that needs to be flicked. Being grateful for what you already have.

A word of advice, then, for my despairing sonnet writer (and maybe the cat in the window 😺) — take a leaf out of Kara’s book and turn to gratitude. Hoping and praying that good fortune will come your way is all very fine, but there’s no guarantees as to when, or even if, it will ever eventuate. While you wait for the happy day, a life oriented towards gratitude — not bitterness, self-pity and despair — may be enough to give you the happiness you seek. The good fortune, when it comes, is the bonus. 😄

I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness — it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude. Brené Brown

If you have a couple of minutes, please give Kara’s uplifting poem a read -

I’ve written this piece as my own contribution to the invitation I issued a few days ago for writers of poetry to join the Hope challenge initiated by Sahil Patel as part of the celebration of World Poetry Day on March 21st.

I chose to respond to my own call to ‘get your twittle on’ by writing some twittle verses. For those unfamiliar with a twittle, it’s a micropoem of exactly 100 alphabet letters arranged into four lines with an optional rhyme scheme. You can learn more about twittles, here.

My hope is that all writers of poetry will be inspired to put pen-to-paper or fingers-to-keyboard and create something special that we can all be grateful for on World Poetry Day. 💛

My grateful thanks to you all for reading. 🙏 💕