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1455 Literary Arts · Jun 28, 2026

Young Poets Featured Reading: Erin Thomas

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Sean Murphy · 1455 Literary Arts

Meet Erin Thomas, a featured poet from our upcoming Young Poets Anthology! She posted a reading video, and as the first to do so we wanted to give her an extra special shoutout! In the video above, she introduces herself and reads an excerpt from her poem, Hope Underneath Those Feathers, as Humanity.

Erin Thomas is a twenty-year-old poet from Wilmington, Delaware. She’s a junior at the University of Delaware and enjoys writing with experimental poetic forms and ideas.

This reading is an excerpt from her full poem:

It’s as if a thousand crows have spread their wings across the night sky
In a velvet canopy, in an effort to block out the little light from the moon,
The stars. We loved counting them. Now we count the caws like thunderclaps.
Just waiting for the storm to pass, sitting inside.
You light a long candle and pass it around the room until new sparks grow.
Those nasty birds can’t snuff out the flame in here, you say, they’re stuck
In the hopeless echo chamber of the sky while little people, you and me,
Light a fresh supernova in our living room.
One bird drops, then another. I didn’t notice,
But you were looking for it, and with a strong shake of my arm,
You gasped, “There, there!” A shard of light in the wake of thunder
As those old crows gave way under the ever-older herald of endings.
How did you know? Your eyes flash and flash in new revelations:
“I have never seen a night without a day, or an end without a beginning.”

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Read the original on 1455litarts.substack.com

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