MARCH 23
“Hope is the thing with feathers”

I’ve not been enjoying seeing Baghdad bombed. Whatever debatable arguments there are for having gone in, the fact that innocent people are being bombed to death or maimed for life like that little Iraqi girl with the severed spinal column, that violence is done to the innocent, negates any argument for the war that’s taking place. The tons of money being spent could be spent on better things than death lining the pockets of the rich. This could have been done peacefully with the world watching. But the world is run by bullies who need to get their rocks off. When shall the meek inherent the earth? When hell freezes over I suppose.

Well, there’s always hope, as Emily Dickinson has so succinctly said. Do you know this poem? I make my class memorize the first stanza to exercise their brains.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet never in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Don Yorty

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