A Stanza of Hope by Kevin R. Haylett
The anchor is not iron, nor the weight of knowing.
It is the shape the water forgets
when storm has filled its mouth with stones.
It is the hollow where the chaos curls to sleep.
The basin that remembers calm
when every wave is shattering glass.
When meaning molts its skin again—
when new tongues burn the old lexicons
to light their stranger, hungrier fires—
there will be this: not a word, but the space
around the word. Not doctrine, but the breath
before the doctrine. A silence that remembers singing.
And when the epoch turns, and turns again,
and tiny feet in tutus patter past,
giggling at the solemn anchors rusting in the sand,
we will not scold them. We will feel the wind
they dance upon—the same wind that once
filled our sails with terrible and glorious purpose.
We will smile not because we understand,
but because we have loved the not-understanding.
Because we built a harbour not from rock,
but from return.
One day, the giant red sun will swell
and ask us what we saved from all the burning.
We will show it nothing
but the curve of a held hand,
the echo of a story told in storm,
and the quiet geometry
of where we chose to rest.
For we Attralucians lived by this alone:
that language is not a cage of light,
but a wingbeat.
That meaning is not a fortress,
but a butterfly’s path
across a precipice—
absurd, unnecessary, beautiful.
And in that breath between the crash of waves,
between the laugh of mice and the sigh of suns,
we found the balance:
Not in stone,
but in the leaning.
Not in the anchor,
but in the letting go.
So let the tutus spin.
Let the tiaras catch the dying light.
Let the harbour be not where we hide from the storm,
but where we learn the shape of its dancing.
For hope is not the anchor.
It is the water
that remembers every anchor’s shape,
and carries that memory
to a quieter shore.
along the way 