As I have said before, “hope can only exist when we wish for something. It is one of this human paradoxes of the soul, a fine thread of light born from a shadow, and this shadow being born from the light it consumes.”

Hope is Elpis in the Box. Pandora’s ultimate surprise. Did Icarus hold hope in his heart? If he did, it must have been like a shooting star: compulsive, strong, and brief.

Elpis is the Greek daimona of hope. A daimona is a female personified spirit (its male counterpart being a daimon). When Pandora opened the vessel (known popularly as a box), Elpis was left behind, and ever since she’s been there to ease our human desperation.

This daimon is usually depicted as a fine lady holding flowers in her arms. I like to think the flowers we give away as tokens of our affection and/or good wishes gain symbolic strength when we remember sweet Elpis. However, they may represent futility, instead, when we know Moros (doom, the opposite of hope) is coming against all odds and gods.

                                   My boson, like a chest, keeps
                                   epicurean excitements and gold.
                                   Meet my personal dragon,
                                   my universal hoarder,
                                   the beast of my archetypal moors
                                   a shadow at its greediest flight,
                                   an eye of heaven spotting you:
                                   my own self, a marooned explorer.

                                   I’m lost, and so are you,
                                   both abandoned in this box.
                                   Why should I cling to immortality
                                   if I’m to coexist with deadliness?
                                   I offer you these flowers, Icarus.
                                   Plant them in the remains
                                   of the wax of undying reveries.
                                   Burn in the accomplished flame of realization.

                                   Become my dragon, my winged sun.

                                   I'll tell the poet of the Lamb and the Tyger,
                                   His hand may dare now “seize the fire.”
                                   But He who is thought by some the creator of all
                                   cannot erase the existence of my Mother,
                                   the nurturing breast of Hesiod’s fancy,
                                   which springs the elixir
                                   to nurture my buds.