David Dephy

Hope

Listening to your voice on the other side of silence

gives me the courage to lose sight and swim there, 

your voice is hope trusting the future. Your voice 

is summer. It calls me now: we are what we hear, 

doubt is deadlier, but fear cuts deeper than air, 

and I am not moving toward revenge, 

I forgive myself my own loneliness. 

It’s hard to form.

With

With a million smiles and still lonely.

I said: “Only once. It’s because we’ve forgotten our hearts.”

You said: “Once is enough, if with compassion.”

“Must have been a dream,” I considered and said zero, 

but late one night, on the knife-edge of dawn, 

I found the words: “Once is enough,” you mumbled, 

your brow bracing the summer sky.

Precious

Summer. Solstice. June. 21st. The smell of the rays.

Faces of children. May I always consider them precious.

Hearts of lovers. May I always consider them precious.

Hands of judges. May I always consider them precious.

May I be the seer of visions and see the kindness in my 

own eyes when I look at yours. May I consider you precious. 

standing quietly in the dark when you are as a mountain’s 

mist, the mist above all my expectations, the mist drifts 

on the valley and whispers the fairy tales and its singing breath 

is undisclosed, and it still hides deep within the strength with 

which the life begins. May I feel the clearest vision of what’s 

before all the truth-seekers on their way, a fear or glory or a danger 

alike and yet in spite of everything go out to meet it face to face, 

eye to eye, thought to thought, ‘cause as we know we become 

what we think. Thoughts. May I consider them bridges, 

from here to eternity. Eternity. I do not know what this is, 

but may I consider it precious, full of the echoes of our heartbeats.