Some attentive readers have noticed that my poem “Hope” included in my collection Poetry is Cyberpunk enters into a dialogue with Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

“Hope” is the thing with feathers – 314

By Emily Dickinson

“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.

Dickinson’s poem offers the image of hope as a small bird: perched within the soul, singing without words, constant, self-sustaining, asking nothing in return.  It is an image of completeness, of presence without effort, of endurance without strain.

When I first read this poem, I was captivated by the clarity of its image and its lightness. Yet even in that moment of admiration, I found myself responding to Emily Dickinson inwardly.  Her vision of hope is undeniably beautiful, but my own encounters with hope have felt different.  It was from this inner exchange that my poem began to take shape.

Hope has returned to me many times; it is the force that propels my existence.  And yet, most of my experiences of hope have emerged in circumstances marked by darkness, despair, insecurity, or indifference: moments in which one waits, imagines, and continues without certainty. In my poem Hope, the figure that takes shape is not something already settled within the soul.  It forms through experience, shaped by it, altered by it..

At one point, in my poem, I turn directly toward Dickinson:

“You once described her as soft and light…”

The line acknowledges her image, but it also marks a shift: what follows is not an alternative definition, but a different encounter – my own:

“but hope is a warrior, burning bright.”

To me, hope has always been a warrior, moving in a harsher terrain.  Not in the light brightness described by Dickinson but through friction, trial, repetition, dirt and movement. Hope is not untouched by what surrounds it, it is not above circumstances, it decides to thread through it.

My Hope runs, falters, resumes. It “races through dust,” it rises “when the battle is not won,” it continues even when it is “weary and worn.”  These are not qualities imposed to an abstract idea; they come from lived sequences, moments in which continuation itself becomes the work.

Dickinson writes from a place where hope is already present, already active.
My poem arrives at hope through difficulty: through the need to keep going when nothing guarantees that movement will lead anywhere.

Both experiences of hope are true.

And perhaps that is why I hold Dickinson’s poem so closely: it makes me feel as if I were having a dialogue with a friend over coffee, discussing our own life experiences and what hope means for us.  Shaping it in language each from where we stand.