1.
Fabric sticks to my skin & rests
damp against Election Day.
Leaves wait for a pouring sky—
abscised & yellowing—
as sapwood drinks up the green.
Mountains bare for snow.
Newborn clouds sag—
their bellies thick with rain.
/
Bellies thicken with stillborns.
Rain clouds sag.
Mountains, bare of green,
drink up the sapwood snow.
Abscised & pouring
leaves wait for a yellowing sky,
resting damp against the fabric.
Election Day sticks to my skin.
2.
I’m all shivers here in Texas.
Up through the roof the air
swells with water & clouds cut
heat-lightning silhouettes
& the muted world
holds its humid breath.
/
Holding muted breath
in the humid world,
heat-lightning clouds
swell with water & silhouettes cut
up through the roof & shiver.
I’m all air here in Washington.
3.
All of this is true.
The country will be changed.
Storm clouds promise a deluge but
you have to carry hope into the world.
Life first began under water,
amid volcanic acidity and heat.
We have to do the work.
This is a time of hands.
/
This is a time of work.
We have the hands to do it
even in the depths of this heat.
Life holds all the hope of water
carrying the world.
Thunder promises our downfall but
the country will be true.
All of us must change.
4.
We have to reimagine hope
in this broken America.
/
It’s not a broken hope.
We have to reimagine America.
–
Poet’s Note
Hope is a vital human need. We need to believe that our lives will continue, and that we will live them joyfully. Obama’s 2008 campaign used the single word as its slogan. And Harris’s 2024 campaign chose “Hope Again.” This poem began as an older set of stanzas that I wrote in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. I’ve remodeled those stanzas—hoping to cast a kind of palinode spell—to calm our collective election anxiety and to search for hope.
–
Lynne Ellis writes in pen. Their words appear in the North American Review, Poetry Northwest, the Seventh Wave, and many other beloved journals and anthologies. Winner of the Washburn Prize, the Perkoff Prize, and the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, she believes every poem is a collaboration. Read their digital chapbook, “Future Sketchbook,” online at Harbor Review. Ellis is founding editor at Tulipwood Books, a developmental-editing poetry press.
