"I can write the saddest grant proposal tonight"

The poem below is thanks to Vu Le who writes an insightful and often funny blog about managing a nonprofit organization called Nonprofit and Friends (formerly Nonprofit With Balls).  

​Here is his latest:

I can write the saddest grant proposal tonight

Write, for example, the night is cold,
And a family shivers, huddled in the darkness,

An old keyboard rattles under fingertips and sings

I can write the saddest grant proposal tonight
I loved you, and yesterday you loved my org too

On a night like this, I held your award letter,
Reading it again and again under the infinite sky

You loved us at times, and at times we loved you too

I can write the saddest grant proposal tonight
To think we have failed, to feel we have lost

To see the immense hole in the budget, immenser without you
And the outcomes fall to the page like hummus to a plate.

What does it matter that we are an existing program?
What does it matter the illusion of sustainability?

In the distance, a program director weeps. In the distance.
The night is cold, and my soul is not content.

My eyes, exhausted, scan your website
My heart, drained and battered, continues hoping.

I love you, yet I hate you, yet I love you, yet I hate you.
Grants are so small, and the restrictions so large

Another. You will fund another. Like you funded us before.
Maybe our logic model was not strong enough? Our Appendix A?

On a night like this, I think of what we could have done.
The night is cold, and my soul is not content

Though I wish this be the last pain you make me suffer,
I know this will not be the last of your RFPs I’ll respond to.

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