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