
It’s Said Hope is the Thing with Feathers,
but this morning, feathers smear the lawn,
aftermath of some creature’s nocturnal
hunger. Days like this, the world
is difficult to love. It’s a warning
of itself, a strip of filmy caution tape
draping the mouth. When someone says,
“We’re all in this together,” I know it’s meant
to comfort, but why does it sometimes take
prolonged catastrophe to show us what’s been true
from the start? I want to believe in Us—
a universal humanity, a common bond
resistant to everything that fractures, mutual
desire to overcome. Days like this, I hope
so fiercely, I stuff my vest with its feathers
until the seams threaten to burst,
so when I step outside to clear the dying garden,
hope’s quills abrade my skin. Months ago,
in my greed, I thumbed sunflower seeds
into every blank inch of soil, wanting summer
to overwhelm me with yellow. But for every goldfinch
plucking seed, another thuds the plate-glass,
dizzy for more, and though I could blame the flowers,
their shaggy insistence at the power of happiness,
what sort of person would that make me?
“Hope is the thing with feathers” is a line by Emily Dickinson.
– painting by Megan Perkins
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