Hope 2011

Expanding on a snippet from the Sydney Festival event tonight, Festival Keynote: Hope 2011 - Stories That Must Be Told. MC Wendy Harmer quoted a line from Emily Dickinson's poem 254, oft referred to as Hope is the thing with feathers. 

Dickinson is a RubyfireWrites favourite, so here it is for you...

'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.