Love this more every time 👑

Hope
By Dinah Hawken

It is always bleak
at the beginning
but trees are calm
about nothing
which they believe
will give rise to something
flickering and swaying
as they are: so lucid
is their knowledge of green.

It is to do with waiting.
Shall we wait with trees,
shall we wait with,
for, and under trees
since of all creatures
they know the most
about waiting, and waiting
and slowly strengthening,
is the great thing
in grief, we can do?

It is to do with death:
the great slip in the valley:
when there is nothing left
but to postpone all travel
and wait
in the low gut of the gully
for water, wind and seeds.

And he did it with compassion and humour, without making a minority the butt of the joke as most media did at the time. He didn’t do it to be kitsch or outlandish. His work has always revolved around the stories of outsiders, misfits and outcasts – queer people.

Lynch’s work always explored identity, and in an era of sparse LGBTIQ+ representation he delivered an empathetic (although still flawed) representation that hadn’t been seen much before on mainstream TV.