Erika Herman

Hope sinks through minutes,
as I wait here for you
in the hallway of your building,
like lungs beneath water await breath.

When you open the door I will inhale you deeply,
for water is a desert to the lungs.
And I will receive you as the spent nomad receives the oasis,
sanctifying spring and fig

But for now, there is only the bristly doormat and frigid knob
of your absence,
and the stagnant substance of hours without your face:
no one else swims in this ocean of idleness;
no one is buried in this graveyard of waiting.
All is vacant.
And I am the singular swimmer in vast pastures of wave and water,
the lone mourner before a bare tombstone

I recall how to wait and to hope are the same word in Spanish.
But while waiting needs only absence and time,
hope demands the fortified limb of faith.

My limbs have grown numb.

I wait.

I wait alone for something we all want-
for that last breath, that drink,
that door against which we lean with all our weight, all night,
to swing open, to impart form,
to reveal something tangible we may make sacred
after the long deprivation
in the unpeopled hall of waiting.