Dec. 10, 1830-May 15, 1886
Dear Emily, your words expressed
the weather of the soul—
the hailstorm no less right than sun—
the heart has room for all—
you understood how anguish
is what opens best the heart—
the sadder our circumstance,
the more we speak with stars.
And as I am a wanderer,
your poems are the pasture—
they help me ground myself on earth
but nod to something vaster—
Posts Tagged ‘emily dickinson’
On Her Birthday, a Thank You Letter to Emily Dickinson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emily dickinson, paradox, weather on December 11, 2025| 9 Comments »
Becoming the Bird
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, emily dickinson, grief, hope, wind on November 14, 2021| 13 Comments »
Once on a bridge
I had met a hope,
a radiant maybe,
a glint of perhaps,
but I am so far
from that glint today
that when I stand
again on that bridge
I almost hate hope
with its stupid wings,
always promising
to carry us toward
something better.
I stand on that bridge
and stand on that bridge,
my inner perch
empty, silent.
I turn to face
the autumn wind.
It batters my bare skin.
I sing full-throat into the gale.
*This poem is in conversation with Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers …” which you can find here
Emily Dickinson in Houston
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, emily dickinson, love, traffic on June 1, 2021| 1 Comment »
And as I merge onto the interstate
with its ten lanes of traffic and
semis and tolls, Emily sits primly
in the back seat and doesn’t
say a word. She was a bit reticent
to come along—we’re a long way
from Amherst, after all—but
she admitted she was tired
of the New England weather
and longed for something new.
As it is, it’s raining in Houston,
and the puddles on the pavement
splash up onto the windshield
and I grip the wheel more tightly,
sensing Emily’s rising panic.
All around us cars weave
and unweave, changing lanes,
charging the world with an unbraiding
rush. Then she says in a voice so quiet
I can barely hear it beneath
the hum of passing cars,
I loved someone once. It felt
something like this. Beside us,
a siren wails. Yes, she says,
fisting the white skirts of her dress,
Yes, it was exactly like this.
Letter to Emily in October
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emily dickinson, moon, place, poem, poetry, sacred on October 13, 2019| Leave a Comment »
They say you left your house just once
in your last fifteen years—
you slipped alone through veil of night
to see a new-built church.
And rumor says the moon was full
when you escaped your walls—
you had no need for candlelight,
the evening led you well.
Tonight round shines the Hunter’s moon—
so dazzling is the dome
that all the world feels like a church
and night itself a poem.
Perhaps that’s what you understood
and lost your need to leave—
each room, each place is holy
and has a gift to give.
Emily in Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, emily dickinson, love, maria popova, poem, poetry on March 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
We are the only poets, and everyone else is prose.
—Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert
It is perhaps an inner drum,
the meter of the soul
that sometimes finds a resonance
inside another’s halls—
an inner song, an inner scheme
that rhymes with someone else’s,
a dream that scans like heartbeats
inside the other’s pulse.
Yes in this world of counterfeit,
such thrill to find a poem
that redefines Circumference—
and curious, leads us home.
for more on the love letters and life-changing love of Emily Dickinson, read the fabulous Brain Pickings by Maria Popova,
https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/emily-dickinson-love-letters?e=ea2d3e439a
My Nine-Year-Old Daughter Reads Emily Dickinson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, emily dickinson, literature, magic, mother, poem, poetry, reading on June 10, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Mom, she says, I don’t know what it was about that book,
but the pages were falling out and it smelled old
and I think it cast a spell on me.
And I recall the first time I read Emily,
an old cloth book with the text debossed,
how I ran my fingers over the words
and felt them as I read them:
“As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—”
Mom, she says, I didn’t even understand
a single word I read, but I couldn’t stop reading.
And now, I think that book is haunting me.
We are making her bed just before she sleeps,
and I tug on the covers to straighten them.
Yes, I say, her words are like spells.
I memorized that poem, though I was
too young to know of “courteous
and harrowing grace.” I knew only
that when I said the words, they gave
me such an openness, a wideness, a delight,
as if morning found its way into my chest,
and now, thirty years later, the early light
still touches me, still thralls.
The bed remade, she slips beneath
and I lay at her feet and for a time we read.
I want to talk more about Emily,
but the spell is her own and I don’t
want to trespass her magic,
the wonder she feels.
Perhaps someday she, too,
will read these lines,
“Our Summer made her light escape
into the beautiful.”
and know herself more beautiful
for having let them touch her.
Practicing to be Nobody on the Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emily dickinson, loss of the separate self, Nobody, poem, poetry on December 22, 2013| 1 Comment »
Sometimes I wish that Emily
would come knock at my door,
and she’d be wearing white, of course,
and I would bid her in.
And then I might confess to her
as through the door she passed,
“Oh Friend! I’d say, “I’m Nobody!
We are in fact a pair!
But that would be too Somebody
of me to say, I’m sure.
So I would simply let her in
and show her to the couch.
We’d sit and drink a bit of tea.
I imagine it is black.
Would she take sugar? I don’t know.
I’d offer anyway
with cookies that I baked today
the ones with mint inside.
We’d take turns sipping at our tea
and then resting our cups.
I would be sure to not step on
long pauses when she spoke—
just waiting for the full effect
when her words land on me
as oftentimes they do these days,
as when last week I read
again the lines about one’s name,
about the tiresome bog.
I felt such longing in me then
to be a Nobody.
and thought, “You’re so right, Emily,”
But she’d hate to be named.
So when she sits across from me
I never mention how
I’ve read all of her poetry,
I never say her name.
And I don’t dream of asking her
of where she got her thoughts,
the line, for instance, with the frog
the line about the bog.
I simply say, Oh look, the sun,
it’s very nearly down.
And would you like another cup,
before the light escapes.
Postcard to Emily
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged emily dickinson, heron, nightfall, oneness, solitude, sunset on October 30, 2011| 1 Comment »
How the old mountains drip with sunset
—Emily Dickinson
Dear Emily,
It was just as you said, tonight,
the San Juans rose and blue,
and in the shallow reservoir,
the herons dripping, too—
I did not mean to startle them
as grayly there they stood,
but on hushed feet I stepped myself
into solitude.
Wing after wing they rowed themselves
into the muted dome
till all went dim—oh dark abyss!—
and we were held as one.