I Wanted Nothing Less than Hope

Music: O vos omnes.
Tomas Luis de Victoria.
Performed by The Tudor Concert at the Free Music Archive
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

I wanted nothing less than hope,
But, relishing despair,
I plunged into the nearest hell
And spent some weekends there.

I saw no answers on the walls,
No rebirth in the rain,
No saving grace in suffering,
No rapture born of pain.

What held me there? It must have been
The jackal, crazed and lean,
Who took my face between his paws
And, hungry, picked it clean.