Despair at a Crusade

Following eleven specific

What ifs, she concludes, what if nothing

Changes? That would be impossible.

She should have no worries there. But you

Know she doesn’t intend nothing as

No thing. She’s aware of the changes.

No, she intends something like the least

And with regard to a specific

Target for a particular change—

What if, after everything she’s lived

And done, there hasn’t been the slightest

Change in her preferred direction for

Whatever it is she’s worked to change,

All her life, it seems? That’s the nothing

Changes intended despite changes,

The question that’s harder to answer.

Pick a single, historical cause,

Say, universal suffrage. It starts

Out a little wild-eyed. All causes

Emerge from fringes of how things are.

As a cause gets pushed to the middle

Of general discourse, that’s a change.

If the cause vanishes from discourse,

That’s also a change. But neither change

May be what she means now by nothing

Changes. It would have to be a change

In favor of her cause, one of those

Goals she joined the cause to campaign for.

If the major conditions that spurred

Her to join the cause persist, of course

She may find herself asking, over

And over, what if nothing changes?

Here the world offers comfort solid

And cold as a block of glacial ice—

Every point will change, even the most

Intransigent, ancient, enduring

Fact—every fact will be eroded,

If not within the questioner's life.

Those changes that are not? They will be.

But not only will they finally

Come to pass. They would have come to pass,

Whether she had been involved or not.

There's comfort in knowing she had

Nothing to do with nothing changing

Nor change at last? Maybe she sped things.