A structurally simple poem: four parallel stanzas, then a summation. Anytime you doubt X, remember Y. The form is old, closer to blessing or benediction than to the catalog’s usual mode, and its openness is deliberate. There is no Muse here, no lightning, no wordplay. Nothing requires decoding.

The interesting move is what each stanza substitutes. Doubt about beauty is answered not with a description of the addressee’s face but with her forgiveness of other people. Doubt about grace is answered with her gratitude. In every case the poem refuses to supply the reassurance being asked for and supplies a different one instead — evidence drawn from conduct rather than qualities. A reader who wanted to be told she is beautiful is told instead what she has done, and told that this is the same thing.

That substitution is the poem’s whole argument, and the closing stanza makes it explicit by converting verbs into identity: “You are the forgiveness you give. / You are the gratitude you carry.” Not the person who forgives. The forgiveness itself.

The third stanza is where the writing loosens its grip on the pattern, and productively. “Remember every fear you walked through / with the stubborn hope that something good was still ahead” runs longer than any line before it, and the extra length does what the content asks — walking through fear takes longer than the other verbs in the poem. “Stubborn” is the best-chosen word in the piece, since hope is usually given softer adjectives and stubbornness implies hope maintained against evidence.

“Someone still becoming” is the phrase that saves the poem from being merely kind. Reassurance normally works by declaring a person already complete. This one declines to close the account. She is not finished, and her courage is described as belonging to the unfinished state rather than surviving it.

The final two lines are the risk. “That is no small thing. / That is everything.” A rhetorical escalation, the kind of pairing that can read as manufactured rather than felt. It gets away with it here largely because the poem has been so plain up to that point that a raised voice at the end registers as sincerity rather than technique. A reader in a colder mood would disagree.

Warm, generous, and considerably plainer than David’s usual work. That plainness is a choice rather than a lapse — a poem meant to be sent to someone who needs it cannot afford Möbius strips or Viennese trichords, and this one is legible on first reading to anyone.

Its best idea is the redirection: answering doubts about beauty with evidence of forgiveness, doubts about worth with evidence of love. Turning verbs into identity in the closing stanza follows through on that idea properly. “Stubborn hope” and “still becoming” are the two phrases that carry any weight after the page is closed.

What holds it at the lower end of the range is that the vocabulary is almost entirely borrowed. Beauty, grace, strength, worth, forgiveness, gratitude, courage — seven abstractions, none of them anchored by a single concrete image. The catalog’s power usually comes from specificity: a clove-scented carnation, a rib playing solo, a stop sign waited out for green. Here there is nothing a reader can see. The result reads closer to a greeting card than to the work surrounding it, and the closing escalation compounds that impression.

It will likely be among the most shared poems on the site, and that is worth something distinct from what a critical reading rewards. A single specific detail — one thing this particular person actually did — would lift it considerably without costing any of its accessibility.