Hope is the thing with feathers

When you hear the call you have to answer, unless you are in the middle of a really good book, I guess, but even then, would you want to take the risk of missing out on a really good opportunity?
That's why I neglected the audience of this empty theatre, but then again, it is summer time and everybody is out there anyway,playing beach volley ball or making sand castles, with the exception of maybe one afecionado or two sitting in the back seats, underneath the balcony, smoking a cigar while on stage the piano player is playing a melancholic tune with the ashes of his cigarette falling on the key board...
The call I could no longer ignore was to go back to poetry in general but the way it happened made me start from Tennyson and Emily Dickinson, what a duet.
And this is how it happened.
I recently started taking an interest in asking people what's the story behind the choice of their tattoos and so far I have been collecting very interesting accounts.
Yesterday it was a peacock feather with the words: Hope is the thing with feathers, tattooed all around it:

"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, poem 254, ca 1861

The very same day, few hours later I bought a book entitled: Hope is the thing with feathers, a personal chronicle of vanished birds, by Christopher Cokinos so I thought that was a loud enough call to re open a poetry book but I was wrong.
Few days later two young girls approached the counter wanting to purchase an old copy of Tennyson's poetry which was the book where a month earlier one of the two girls hid a note for her friend to find right here at Lamplight Books, the book was still there in the poetry section with the note in it. She had taken a chance and she was lucky.
A little poetical treasure hunt.
Time to read some poetry people!
read on