Releasing "Hope & Bandages" by Victoria Chang
Let me tell you a story
about hope: it always starts
and ends with bandages.
Victoria Chang
//
This short poem is from a longer sequence called "Love Letters," which closes Victoria's excellent book The Trees Witness Everything (full of short, dense, heavy and heart-expanding poems). I printed another piece from it some years back, Bird & Stone. At the same time I had selected a couple others, thinking toward a small series, but time came and went and this one about hope and bandages is what kept lingering.
Come to find, that the very closing lines echo it near entirely except one word: "birds" enters in place of "bandages." How's that for a hopeful place to end, when clawing toward hope continues always a struggle? I had seen the version with "birds" quoted in a friend's email signature and decided it must be a typo. No way those lines ended there, on birds. I mean yes, the bird and the stone, and not killing it. But a bird in the same breath as hope?
Hope is hard, right? Impossible so much of the time. Trite, often. Useless feeling. But then it’s there, stubborn too. The idea doesn’t quit no matter how bastardized the Emily Dickinson quote about feathers gets. No matter how many Hallmark cards tell you some shit about getting through.
I am all the time thinking more about being in vs getting through. About staying with vs going past. Grief is every year more about integration and less about letting go. All the hard things, they are here. Any wound can open at any time. Healing is not linear. And our hurts help us. They inform my days. Not least of which, they provide a basis of thanks upon which to greet any sweet or non-stressful moment. I am in awe. I am in wonder. They are like the rotting leaves in our garden right now — slick and scary on the pathways, hearty and heavy in the spent beds. I don’t desire to do away with any of them; just maybe rearrange them a bit, gather up and pile on the places that need to rest and rebuild over the winter, clear the places we need to pass through safely to the mailbox and back.
I’m delighted to offer you this new small print today. As is always the case, it’s a few lines I’ve been thinking about a long time. Years, yes. But I have actually had them set and ready to print, waiting on the stone, this whole year. A year of hope, a year of bandages. And a reminder, that hope is always a story. We get to tell it if and when we want.
Wishing you good ground, clean bandages, and time for tending.
//
Credits
From “Love Letters,” The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press. Copyright 2022 Victoria Chang. Used by permission.
Thanks to Victoria Chang for being so responsive, open, and interested. Thanks to Copper Canyon always for permission and the collaborative spirit with which they offer it.
//
Links to purchase
Get the book: The Trees Witness Everything and the print: Hope & Bandages.
