All We Can Do Is Hope

Salena Godden

May 31, 2025

Transcript

All we can do is hope that the people we love could love us too, that the people we want to spend time with could make time to spend with us too.

After all the hullabaloo everything leaves its scratch and scar tissue, you get altered and informed by the people that come and the people that go.

This constant metamorphosis is the snake skin of your next decisions that will be shed, because there is no standing still, everything is changing.

There is only snatching time to be alone, to brush yourself down, to see where you have landed this time, who you have landed as and what you might like to do next, or later, with who, or not.

It is the nature of things to grow and change.

It is the wheel of fortune and fate, choices and happy accidents, how wonderful and terrible at once, it is both puzzling and a freedom.

Sometimes we sit with the cage door wide open.

It is crippling and a responsibility being wrong and right and there we find more choice to have regrets or to feel guilty, to judge or hold grudges or forget it or take some time to heal or count your pieces of silver.

At sunset I look at the dirty canal water reflecting drunks on stag nights in St Patrick's Guinness hats slavering at the windows of the red light district.

I am meniscus, spilling with a realisation, I am not who I thought I was.

I looked for myself but I was not there or here, not anymore.

It is the nature of things to grow and change, I forgot that included me.

And now the whores look so young and half empty the red-eyed sniggering Irish lads are not cute but an annoyance and the junky is a dead-eyed rat with his open-wound twitching huddled over a flame by the bins.

I look at this wooden bridge. I wonder how long that took to build and how quickly we destroy bridges.I can hear my ghosts clattering against Amsterdam’s cobbled stones

I am laughing and I am eighteen and out of my head.

Crying and I am twenty-five and out of my head.

Singing. I am twenty-eight and out of my head.

Silence.

Thirty-three and in my head I wonder when she got here, this woman.

I order a small beer and smoke alone in this Amsterdam bar.

I am brushing myself down to see where I have landed this time and who I am, both exhausted and exhilarated by this question because even stopping to write this was a choice.

Now, if I am ever found, we should come to this bar, because this is the place where this poem was made.

Because all I ever could do was hope. Because all we can do is hope.

All we can do is hope that the people we love can love us too.

Vintage audio archive:

I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.

This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.

This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…