Apr 2

Apr 2 Hope is the thing with feathers

It was my birthday yesterday.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years making sure that I had a good birthday, since somehow the people around me don’t always think to plan that for me. Heck, last year, Morris and I spent my birthday in Paris (and then visited London as well).

Instead, I found myself finishing a jigsaw puzzle while listening and half-watching my Senator on TV. I live in New Jersey, and Senator Cory Booker made me incredibly proud and happy and hopeful with his 25 hour, 4-minute speech on the floor of the Senate. Hours later, the results of an election in Wisconsin came in, and the people of the state rebuffed an oligarch’s attempt to purchase a state supreme court justice.

I found myself feeling hopeful. Not just a wispy sort of hope, either. More like a “ready to run through a wall like the KoolAid man” level of hope.

Today, as I sit here to write this, I have remembered a few other things. First, that it is National Poetry Month, and I meant to observe it with a poem a day this year—I did read a poem yesterday, but I also meant to be writing, so I will get on it. Because . . . Second, I am a poet. I have been since childhood, and I want to reconnect myself to that.

Third, and maybe finally, when thinking about hope, I naturally recalled Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers”

Yesterday’s events didn’t provide me hope from an external source. They just fanned the hope that is always inside me. The hope that this can be a more fair and just world. The hope that we can value our neighbors as ourselves, and not do anything to them we wouldn’t like done to ourselves. The hope that we can take care of people less fortunate than us, so that they can eventually lift themselves up. The hope that not everyone who is rich or powerful will ignore the suffering of others.

Hope is the thing with feathers.

Hope is the thing.

Hope is.