Casting Out Hope

On a good day, ten people appear—
or say they do.
Small squares of light, faces half-formed,
held there a moment, then gone.

I sit in the cold room
where the unused things collect:
candles without flame, a sign turned inward,
chairs that remember other bodies.
I am not separate from them.

My hands move.
Dials, keys, the small obediences
that make a voice travel.
Images answer images.
A human figure reduced to signal,
then lifted again, almost—
almost presence.

What do we send each other
across this distance?
A word, sometimes. A song.
Something like belief, though thinner,
as if it had passed through fire
and lost its shape.

“Where two or three are gathered”—
the line returns, unbidden,
but here we are, dispersed,
each alone with our own listening.

Still, something persists.
Not certainty. Not even faith.
But the act itself—
this reaching, this refusal to be silent,

as if the signal might carry
more than we put into it,
as if, in the thin exchange,
something were given back.