Not Every Moment
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
Not every hour arrives with promise tucked inside its sleeve.
Some come empty-handed,
grey as November river stone,
carrying only the low hum of absence
where hope usually sings.
The world will tell you otherwise—
that silver linings are mandatory,
that dawn is a contract every night must honour.
But the truth is quieter:
there are seasons when the light simply forgets the address,
when the heart reaches out
and finds only its own fingers closing on cold air.
And that is allowed.
It is allowed to sit in the hollow between heartbeats,
to let the fog settle in your lungs
without apologising for breathing it.
To rest your cheek against the unyielding wall of “not yet”
and remain there—
unheroic,
untransformed.
No parable required.
No lesson waiting to bloom from the ache.
Sometimes the ache is all there is—
the ancient, human right
to feel hopeless
without needing to earn your way back out of it.
The earth keeps turning anyway.
Rivers carve canyons in patient silence.
Trees stand bare through the longest months,
and no one calls them weak.
They simply wait,
roots drawing what little the dark will spare,
knowing—somewhere beneath knowing—
that growth and grief can share the same quiet bed.
So let the hopeless moments come.
Let them stay as long as they must.
There is dignity in their company—
a kind of fierce gentleness
in refusing to paste borrowed stars
across a sky that has every right to be bare.
One day the light may remember you again.
Or it may not.
Either way, you will still be here—
breathing,
belonging,
entirely enough
in the grey,
in the hollow,
in the quiet, ordinary truth
that the story continues.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
Not Every Moment is a quiet refusal of the pressure to find hope in everything. It lives in the spaces where nothing resolves, where light doesn’t arrive on cue, and where simply continuing is its own kind of truth. This poem offers permission—to sit in the hollow without explanation, to feel without reframing, and to exist without needing to transform the experience into something meaningful or redeemable. It doesn’t promise that things will get better. It simply honours the reality that not every moment does—and that this, too, is part of being human. 💚