And What If I Spoke of Despair

And What If I Spoke of Despair Summary | Detailed Summary

"And What if I Spoke of Despair?" is a short poem about a lifetime of loving the Earth, despair over the state of the natural environment and the hope that the globe can be loved appropriately.

The poem begins with the question asked in the title, "And what if I spoke of despair?" and then validates that every person feels despair at some point. Every person can feel hopelessness running inside himself as if it is blood coursing through veins. Although the feeling of despair is a universal one, the actual source of the despair is very personal.

Normally, beauty prompts the hopeless feeling and brings the resulting ennui forward. For the author, that beauty arrives in the form of nature's evolutions, such as the rain puddling on a fallen leaf, fall foliage or a September moon which demands that a person stop driving, pull over and just stare heavenward. Gazing lovingly at the moon is like looking at a photograph of a loved one in a uniform who has not yet left. Beauty can also be found in the memory of a day at the beach surrounded by a family that stays to watch the sun setting over the water. The water and the air are the constants in life, just like the comfort of a mother's touch.

People take all these beauties for granted. They drive cars that pollute the air and dump waste that pollutes the rivers so that "we've created a salmon with the red, white and blue shining on one side." Even tomatoes, which have been "humiliated enough," are not safe from man's experimentation.

One man's argument is that genetic engineering is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. The author is not sure if she should be thankful this particular person is still aware enough to be alarmed or frightened that he has become acclimated enough to consider the second option as less of a threat.

The author has no immediate answers for the world's environmental distress and does not ask for any solutions from the reader. There is one thought, though, that occurs to the author as she walks a path strewn with manzanita bark and yellow bay leaves. There cannot be any harm in cradling despair like a mother holds her baby after he falls asleep and then does not relinquish the child when the immediate reason to hold is gone, simply because the mother does not want to let go.