Introduction
I kept asking a deck of cards to tell me something a person should have told me himself. That is where this poem about waiting for love started not with heartbreak exactly, but with the exhausting habit of looking for signs where there were none. Most poems about waiting for someone you love focus on the ache of not knowing. Mine started there too. I wanted proof that what I felt was real. The tarot never gave it to me. Life did, eventually, just not in the way I expected.
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The Poem
Where Cards Stop Lying
The wait i was waiting never came till the end,
and still i shuffled through the deck of my own mind,
hoping one card would turn and say your name.
I wished the tarot could read you into my hands
not fate, not fortune, just proof
that you were something more than a feeling i made up alone.
I wished my mind could keep you like a card kept in a pocket,
worn soft at the edges, always pulled out
when i needed to believe in something.
But the deck never lied the way i wanted it to
it just sat there, quiet,
asking me questions only you were supposed to answer.
In the pieces of jewelry i wished i could see
your lucky charm, the one that kept you
tied to whatever eternity you’d chosen,
an eternity that was never meant to hold me.
I turned it over in my mind like a coin i couldn’t spend,
wondering if luck looked like this for you
quiet, certain, already decided,
while mine still waited on a card that wouldn’t turn.
Maybe eternity was never the two of us together.
maybe it was just me, holding a charm that wasn’t mine,
calling it luck because grief needed a softer name.
Then the wait i was waiting for ended
not with you, but with the truth of you and her,
two names that finally stopped needing me in between.
And in that same breath, without asking the cards for anything,
another hand found mine
not the one i prayed for, but the one that stayed.
The disappointment in me didn’t vanish because i was right.
it vanished because someone else
turned out to be the answer i never knew i was waiting for.
Why Poem About Waiting For Love
I wrote this during a phase of disappointment I didn’t fully understand at the time waiting for something that kept not arriving, and quietly wondering if I had built more meaning into it than was ever really there. Psychologists who study unrequited love point out that a lot of that stuck feeling comes from projecting our own hopes onto someone, (Psychology Today) which is exactly what the tarot cards and the lucky charm were standing in for here not him, but my own need for something to hold on to.
The wait ended the way it actually happened to me. I watched him end up with her, and in that same breath, someone new found my hand and held it back. It wasn’t the ending I had prayed for. It was still the one that finally let the disappointment go.
If this is a wait you know too, you might also feel The Space You Left or 3 Painful Truths This Poem About Love Taught Me.
FAQ
- What is this poem about waiting for love really about?
- It’s about searching for certainty in the wrong places tarot cards, charms, signs and realizing that the answer to a painful wait doesn’t always come from the person you were waiting for.
- Does the poem have a happy ending?
- Yes. The speaker’s disappointment resolves not because the original hope came true, but because someone new arrives at the same moment the old wait ends.
- What imagery does the poem use?
- Tarot cards, a lucky charm, and a coin each representing a different way the speaker tried to find proof of love outside of themselves.
- Why does the speaker read tarot cards instead of just asking for answers directly?
- Because some questions feel too vulnerable to ask out loud. The cards became a safer place to look for hope than the person actually holding it
If you are still in your own version of the wait, you don’t have to sit with it alone read more of my poems on longing and letting go here, or leave a comment below and tell me what you are waiting for.
