What if tomorrow, when you wake up in the morning in your familiar room amongst your posters and books and clean clothes piled high on your desk chair, the morning light from your window kissing your brow and encouraging, or perhaps even collaborating with, the robin, whom you have watched over many days dedicatedly make a home for itself on your windowsill, into performing its red-breasted melody, in an effort to pull you from sleep with all the care and gentleness one might use when repotting their favorite houseplant, a gentleness you will welcome after the news yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, your phone a poisonous catalog of all the world’s doom,

[the shooting in Colorado, the record summer in the Arctic, the executions in Iran, the executions in Texas, the neighbor’s home seized, the positive test results, the water still contaminated, he’s relapsed again, another species gone, another forest gone, another Black boy gone, another, another, another]

yes, what if tomorrow, despite those things, despite the terror and the terrible, despite the myriad apocalypses that are always knocking at the door and bubbling up from the drain and hyena-howling through the night, what if tomorrow you discard your pessimism, your cynicism, your resignation—the one thing the machine of every empire needs to keep burning—what if tomorrow you resist your despair when it begs you to stay in bed, you can’t do anything out there, it’s useless, what if, instead, you traded them all in for a brighter plumage, returned your jadedness to the dark mine where it came from and freed, instead, the hopeful canary you’ve worked so hard to subdue lest you find yourself disappointed again, knocked down again, but isn’t that why we’re here, you and i, to lift each other up when we stumble, to hold each other through our sobbing, to sheepishly laugh at the sight of our slick faces, to scream and sing and dance and dare to believe that we can make the world we want, the one they’ve said is impossible, the one they called a fantasy, where everyone is fed and everyone has a home and everyone has a coat for the winter and the water is clean and your father is clean and the hospitals are free and the schools are free and the prisons are empty and the precincts are empty and the elephant population is climbing again and the trees are being replanted again and the rain comes on time and spring transforms the dirt into an applause of zinnias and cockscombs and marigolds and there is time to try your hand at painting and there is time to pick up the guitar again and there is time to be longwinded and your neighbor invites you over for dinner and you do the same the following week and the robins have formed a choir with the sparrows and thrushes and cardinals, evening walks with your beloved now scored with all manner of whistling and trilling and it is enough to make you weep, this life, to think that you/i/we denied ourselves all of this abundance simply because we bought into the easy lie of defeat, the empire's centuries-long campaign of despair, when everything we want and can have and could possibly dream of is waiting for us just outside, so c’mon and join us tomorrow, we’re counting all our birds, and singing with them, too. 

Jonny Teklit is the recipient of the 2019 Aliki Perroti and Seth Young Most Promising Young Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, Catapult, Washington Square Review, Alien Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Washington DC.