beyond disease and poverty,
past greed, corruption, and pain
further still into the dark universe
where emptiness devours sanity
and the sparkling stars flickered out
eons ago, their light only now
touching earth

beneath the grave's dark clay
where slow decay lingers and undoes us
behind the mocking doors that never
open to us, heedless of our knocking
rapping, ringing, calling
beside the ocean's angry swells
that reach to swallow the unwary

before all these became reality
defining the suffering of mortality
pre-dating even the earth's formation
came the promise of ultimate triumph
of good over all life's evils
in a single syllable:

hope

our beginning
and our end