Evanescent Emily
(15 May - Dickinson Homestead - Amherst, Mass)
Published in The Poet's Domain, 2000 Edition
Published in Skipping Stones, 2005 Edition
Copyright © 1996, 2005
Jason Lester Atkins
985 Fleet Drive, #347
Virginia Beach, VA 23454
All Rights Reserved.
Each time I meet in darkened hallway
This small elusive figure in white
With her fleeing footsteps falling
Like kisses on the stairway to her
upper room, I remember, early too
She lost her only love
And between loneliness and nothing,
She chose loneliness.
Reclused, alone, she wrote love letters
To the world and recorded a side
Of life turned away from papa's gaze.
She long nursed mother in adjoining room
Until mother became the daughter's child.
Later at table with a cup of tea
Wrote hymns to heal a broken heart,
Addressed a century ahead to me.
Through a window on the garden
Made messengers of white oak trees,
To deliver calling cards into the grass,
Inviting the narrow fellow inside
To share the wine of her mind
Vintaged before the time of Eve
And join a party dancing to the cadence
Of the whirling world.
Too alive to stop for death
So, he kindly stopped by for her.
But, long before that May morning
When they carried her body across
The buttercups, her chosen gentle madness
Had become divine.
Information on Poem About Emily Dickinson
Have formed a close association with Amherst, Mass., in last ten years. I got appointments to visit in the homestead on Wednesday afternoons in town. The Jones Library in town has a 2nd floor museum - with works of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson - and I got to hold originals in my hand. Hence the poem. I used some lines from her work (bold) to create the poem.
Jason Lester Atkins - November 13, 1996.
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