I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send to you.
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.
—For the New Year, 1981 by Denise Levertov
PROJECT STATEMENT
On New Year’s Day, I go to World’s End.
To reach the coast, the true edge of the peninsula, I wind through miles of trails. Puddles crunch under my feet, half crystalline. The sea wind blusters, swaying the trees and the reeds. The stark light casts long shadows and glistens across the shore. I am windswept but warm after scaling the fourth drumlin.
Perched atop World’s End, I look across the harbor and my vast city is made small. A silver sliver surrounded by rippling water and pale blue sky.
I think about the year gone, and the year ahead; hopes and fears, triumphs and disasters, dreams and expectations. I find a prism in my camera bag. I hold it before my eye and twirl it, shifting perspectives again and again. Light bends and refracts. Latent shards emerge, divide, dissolve. Gleaming colors emerge from seemingly nothing. The view is never predictable; always astonishing.
But its not just the light, the water, the perspective that brings me back to this place each year. The story of World’s End lingers with me, it sparks another kind of glimmer.
The 251 acres I wander and adore was once solely a salt marsh and woodland, until much of the land was cleared. Farms came in and were later abandoned. In the 19th century a mansion was built, a private estate established. The estate almost gave way to a residential subdivision— there were plans for 163 homes. In the 20th century World’s End was almost cleared and built over several times. It was considered as the site for the United Nations headquarters in the 1940’s and as the site of a nuclear power plant in the 1960’s. Almost, gone – many times over.
But someone decided they didn’t need the whole peninsula for an estate anymore. People were continually convinced not to build. And many people came together to conserve World’s End, to open it to everyone once more.
The centuries-old work of glaciers remains. A segment of the woodland and salt marsh still stand, are being nurtured. I saw hawks circling, geese soaring, people looking at the water, holding hands.
World’s End is one of my fragments. I share it so it will grow.
***
All photographs made at World’s End, Hingham, Massachusetts