We've Got a Poem! "To Hope Or Not to Hope"

So Rutu is breaking the ice for our Poetry Blog here with her parody of that famous "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy we all love from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

"To Hope or Not to Hope"
To hope or not to hope: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler to accept what seems to be
And move on to happenings of a lesser age,
Or to, by keeping hold on a thread of faith latched to the past,
Lighten clouds and dispel despair
Into the annals of vague history unremembered.
To resign – to accept, forget, and sleep
Forever unbothered by dreams of “if” and “perhaps,”
To doubt no more, but live in certainty,
Though it be that of defeat, still that of peace;
Or to will oneself into golden shackles of elusive trust,
Bound eternally to the pensive past
On the watch for a kindle and spark to warm away the mist,
To forever watch and wait,
Hold bated breath for an absent change.
To let be a shattered heart,
To bury the shards where naught can touch them,
To leave them in pieces too small to break again;
Or to gather and assemble the scattered shards,
Meld them together with light and heat
And display the fragile structure again to the skies,
To feel the caress of the gentle breezes
And the freshening frolicking of the wind and rain
Ere again ’tis pierced by lightning deep
And shattered once more.
To endure and forget and pass beyond;
Or to heal, remember, and remain.
For who would choose to stay anchored in yesterday
And strive to find a hidden door
To make today a different today when
By simple swallowing of circumstance
One could gather one’s life in peace and continue on,
If ’twere not that that peace be not peace,
But a curse seeming calm, flaunting benevolence.
For nay, there is no question, there is never question:
To despair – to be but a breathing corpse too frail to resist,
Too palsied to steer life through newer paths,
Slave to fortune, able only to acquiesce –
Is betrayal of the deepest kind, treason against the heart.
To hope – to live – to wager the soul as ’twas meant to be risked
And discover the strength of a single golden glowing thread is,
Indeed, to fulfill the very essence and purpose of existence,
And to fly beyond mundane thought of time and acceptance,
To be free to think, feel, and love as you will.