The World is a Wall
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
The world is a wall
and I have spent years
throwing myself against it.
Not with bravery.
Not with brilliance.
Just with the stubborn desperation
of someone who doesn’t know
what else to do.
I press my palms to it first —
gentle, hopeful —
as if kindness might open something.
It never does.
So I push harder.
Lean my weight into the stone
until my arms tremble,
until my breath shakes,
until the wall doesn’t even bother
to pretend it might shift.
Then comes the trying.
The real trying.
The kind that turns your bones to dust
and your voice to gravel.
The kind that makes you forget
who you were before the impact.
I run at the wall,
head first,
heart exposed,
risking every soft part of myself
for a crack that never appears.
Some people say the wall moves
for those who believe enough,
want enough,
hurt enough.
But I have believed
until belief became a bruise,
wanted until wanting
felt like a wound,
hurt until hurting
was the only language I spoke —
and still the wall stands,
unchanged,
unbothered.
Hope is just the echo that comes back
after each collision.
A hollow sound that tricks me
into thinking the wall has answered.
It hasn’t.
It never has.
The world is a wall.
And I am the fool
who keeps bashing my head against it,
cracked open but somehow still upright,
bleeding hope onto stone
that has never once
bled for me.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
