There is always something that ends what has been stretching on for infinity. There is always something at the end of the tunnel which makes us keep going.
Some call it hope, or light, or peace, or love. There is always something we’re always reaching for, and we think we can see it running away, and we think we’ll never reach it. But the thing is. We never know. This is a poetry collection about that something.
Table of Contents
As Long As Love Is There by Nidra M.
There is little in the way of words,
very little that can actually be heard,
but a rather lot that we have to say—we pray
we kneel in front of the altar of love
and never look above.
Ants make circles, little fairy rings
the grass moves along, insects grow wings.
Time never passes and no one ever crosses
the river of oblivion to reach some distant home.
And we keep staring down, unknowing, alone.
Kneel. Snarl. Cry. The altar of love.
Doesn’t ever try, doesn’t look above.
But love looks much like love always does,
like home, like hope, like a quiet little dove
taking off for forever, the promise of a tether
left behind on a branch. A nest. To rest.
To come back, to stay, and never go away.
Love looms above, tall and unreachable,
on a golden pedestal of worth inconceivable,
and we never do care, we never despair
if we stay just like that forever on the floor
Kneeling. Praying. As long as it’s there.
As long as love’s there, we do not despair,
because there is little that can be heard,
even less that is conveyed, and we’re still mostly swayed
toward the doomed light of the train.
As long as love is there, at the end of the tunnel,
we walk in blindly, and stumble and fumble,
and we do not despair when we hear the chime.
All that is, is enough time, enough rhyme.
—Nidra Mrduvnak
Here are a few famous poems by the poets we’ve all heard of and read some time or the other—all of whom were probably chasing something at the end of the tunnel.
A Passing Glimpse by Robert Frost
To Ridgely Torrence On Last Looking into his ‘Hesperides’
I often see flowers from a passing car
Robert Frost
That are gone before I can tell what they are
I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track
I name all the flowers I am sure they weren’t.
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt—
Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth—
Not lupine living on sand and drouth
Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.
Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close is both the beginning and the conclusion of this poem by Robert Frost.
Like each of his poems, it creates an image in your head and burrows itself there, content and at home. This one is a half dream, a blurry picture of something almost seen. It is exactly what it says it is—a passing glimpse.
Our eyes never linger on the things divine. We move right past them, even when we’re actively searching for them.
Its probably because we never expect to actually find it. We are never actually sure if we’ll ever even reach the light at the end of the tunnel.
Emily Dickenson
The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.
Emily Dickenson
The heaven we chase
Like the June bee
Before the school-boy
Invites the race;
Stoops to an easy clover —
Dips — evades — teases — deploys;
Then to the royal clouds
Lifts his light pinnace
Heedless of the boyStaring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.
Homesick for steadfast honey,
Ah! the bee flies not
That brews that rare variety.
Doesn’t every dream recede, unrealized and unknown. It’s just a glimpse, easily lost and quickly forgotten. I have always loved Emily Dickinson’s best of all, mainly because you can never really understand it the first time around.
It takes another read to unearth the metaphors buried therein. And even though there are so many metaphors, such symbolism, the picture it creates is still surprisingly real.
The school boy, the honeybee, summer overhead and the thick silence of sleepful comfort. There is the unreachable hidden in the mundane.
The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling
They shut the road through the woods
Rudyard Kipling
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods.
And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods.
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods!”
There was once a road through the woods. There was once something that might no longer be there. Or it might just be. We might never know, but maybe we can.
There is a paradox flying through the tree of every forest, of everything that lives. It both exists and does not, in time, in space, in memory, perhaps.
A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
Edgar Allan Poe
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep
While I weep—while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
A dream within a dream. There is something so haunted, so utterly lost and never found again about Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry. He writes like a memory of an end almost reached chases him into writing.
Can I not grasp the them with a tighter clasp? That which is forever slipping out of reach, out of hold, like grains of sand escaping as they do. Eventually.
His poem is a desperate attempt to hold on and the tragic resignation of losing anyway, all at the same time.
This is a poetry collection about the tunnel, the things that we only glimpse, the things always out of reach. And yet, even though we know it, we cannot help but reach for the unreachable.
Maybe this is what it means to be human—to try, despite all odds.
If you liked this post, please check out other Poetry Collections like Inspirational Poems About Life to Find Hope Again.
