Hopelessness

This morning I woke

and could not find my faith,

the sky was the color of tin,

and even the robins

had nothing to say.

I sat by the window

and watched the rain fall

without pattern,

without promise.

For a while I thought,

this is all there is:

the dull ache of time,

the heart’s heavy stone.

But then, a small thing,

a snail moving

across the wet step,

its body a thin thread of silver

drawing its slow, impossible path.

I don’t know why it mattered.

Only that something

stirred in me again,

not hope, exactly,

but the faint remembrance

of how the world

keeps going on.

And maybe that, too,

is a kind of mercy.