Poem: Hope in Despair | Cassandra Voices

Poem: Hope in Despair

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Hope in Despair

I have always loved museums, no doubt having a kind of prophetic disposition I realised the somewhat terrible and prodigious potency that was entombed in their almost sterile yet  paradoxically life-affirming grace. Loss, chronic loss, is the ultimate domain of all humans.

It seems to me that the problems here below on Earth have reached such an escalatory saturation point that we have been probing space, and for quite some time now, in an almost frantic bid to escape, but, as William Shatner recently said, and I merely paraphrase, space is just full of more cold, dark and hostile matter.

The tremor of the tympany, the delicate frisson which all ten digits can bring, the storm of sounds trembling just as you are standing alone, right there on the brink…

Slow read. Be not fraught with the weight and trouble of your servitude, but rather cherish the day and be more aware of it harbouring amplitude.

Feature Image: The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, Dublin, sometimes called the Dead Zoo.

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About Author

Peter O’Neill is the author of five collections of poetry.  The Exquisite Cadaver is taken from The Enemy – Transversions from Charles Baudelaire ( Lapwing, 2015). His sixth collection of poetry, a bilingual collection translated into French by Yan Kouton, Henry Street Arcade, is to be published by Éditions du Pont de l’Europe and will be launched on the 8th April, 2021, as part of the 200th anniversary celebrations of the birth of Charles Baudelaire which will be hosted by the Alliance Francaise in Dublin.

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