Yearning

This poem explores the paradoxical nature of yearning.

At times, longing feels expansive, carrying within it the quiet anticipation of an experience not yet lived. At other times, the very same yearning becomes painful, exposing the distance between what is present and what the heart still seeks.

Rather than resolving that tension, the poem lingers within it, asking whether hope and ache can coexist without diminishing one another.

This poem came from wrestling with an experience that has accompanied much of my life.

Yearning has never felt entirely painful to me. In fact, some of the most beautiful moments I have known have been filled with it. There are times when longing opens the heart so completely that the future almost feels present. It is as though some part of us already recognizes a life we have not yet arrived at.

But yearning has another face.

The longer something remains unmet, the more hope can begin to collapse beneath the weight of absence. What once felt like inspiration can slowly become hunger, then starvation.

One of the most distinctive images to me is the transition from quiet anticipation into “the beast that wakes a-sudden.” I wasn't trying to suggest that yearning itself becomes monstrous. Rather, I was trying to capture what prolonged deprivation can awaken within us when our deepest needs remain unanswered for too long.

The poem doesn't arrive at an answer because, at least when I wrote it, I didn't have one.

Instead, it ends with imagination.

“So I imagine instead the moment
When yearning is at last dispelled”

Perhaps that final image is itself an act of hope.

Not the hope that denies longing.

But the hope that believes longing may not last forever.