Feathers: a disquisition.

According to one of my very favorite tools, the American Heritage Dictionary, Appendix I, Indo-European Roots, the word feather stems from the root -pet, which means "to rush, fly," and is related in very deep, very ancient ways to the following:  

• petition
• compete
• impetuous
• perpetual
• repeat
• propitious
• apteryx and archaeopteryx 
• peripateia, and 
• symptom.

If, as that brilliant but reclusive American poet once had it, hope is the thing with feathers, are the poems I just sent out to journals 

• pleading their case? 
• fighting for victory? 
• ill-judged? 
• ever going to get published? 
• a sign of a compulsive disorder? 
• lucky, possibly, just possibly? 
• written in an archaic and possibly dead language? 
• doomed to circulate forever? 
• an illness?