Hope

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Dori. You can visit her here at Dori Reads.


(Bird and Vine, tapestry fabric by William Morris, 1834-
1896, English textile designer, artist, and writer)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor, a pacifist who was arrested by the Nazis for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

“The essence of optimism is not its view of the present,” Bonhoeffer wrote while in prison awaiting his execution, “but the fact that it is the inspiration of life and hope when others give in; it enables a man to hold his head high when everything seems to be going wrong; it gives him strength to sustain reverses and yet to claim the future for himself instead of abandoning it to his opponent.”

He was hanged in particularly cruel and painful circumstances on April 9, 1945.

“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.

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet