Steal Your Soul

Everybody hopes for something,
The despairing often the most
Or most intensively. It’s what

Photography brought to the world,
That capture of the expression
Of unstated hope in the eyes.

You’d see it on a few faces
In a lifetime or on many
At once in a terrified crowd,

But not parades of repeated
Looks of want and longing, direct
Stares into the lens from bereft

Widows, tenement children, throngs
Of refugees behind barbed wire,
Prostitutes in mining boom towns,

The miners in mining boom towns,
And on and on, an industry
Suitable for photography.

All sorts of other emotions
Can be inferred as well—sorrow,
Resolution, simmering rage,

Wariness, even hopelessness,
But that peculiar look of hope,
The faces with something in mind,

That whole pornography of hope,
Others’ hope, too much like your own
In sense if not in specifics,

That’s what those old photographs sell
So well. Don’t hang them on your walls.
Look off. Hope against hope, yourself.