A poem of comfort (for me at least...)

For all who know the discomfort of hope and the uncertainity of faith...
My prayers are with him as are yours. I have hope for the fight and faith in God's plan.

Faithless
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits. . .
Matthew Arnold

By mid-July I'm tired of the mountains.
I want to be near the sea,
walk beside it for an hour or two,
watch it cleaning the wounds of the shore.
Such persistence—though we know
there isn't a plan, just this
going back over the same places,
revising everything out.
"Is there a way to win?"
Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum
in Out of the Past. "Well," he says,
"There's a way to lose more slowly."
He knows he shouldn't trust her,
and he doesn't care. Ah, Matthew Arnold,
our lovers are more melancholy than yours,
more desperate, more faithless.
"You can't help anything you do,"
Mitchum tells her at the end.
Which is what he might have told himself.
But nobody ever sees how far
the things we shouldn't feel can take us.
I just want to walk along the shore
for an hour, watch the waves
rearranging whatever they can.
I like the way the sea encourages me
to think about the past,
as if I could leave it where it is:
the moon on the water, the stars
that gleam and are gone.

By Lawrence Raab