It’s her day. Dec. 10, 1830, she came
Into the world and lived in its hands
The way she wanted to live and died
In its hands the way she wanted to die.
What she did not want is for us to see
Her witchery with words, but in the end,
The poetry breathed stronger than that wish
And we breathe stronger for her words.
In November, I got to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum and Homestead. I had a wonderful tour guide and met the museum director Jane Wald and spent an entire day in poetic euphoria. Please go visit this museum and/or support its work in any way that you can. It is truly a wonderful, personal, and lyric experience. Like ROMP, it is a museum, but not a cold, institutional-like environment in any way.
I also got lost a while in Amherst Books and visited the cemetery where she is buried and where a wonderful town memorial has her as a centerpiece.
[NOTE: I saw the word error in the sentence below but decided to keep it.]
Since following in love with E.D. when I was a teenager reading
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us–Don’t tell!
They’d banish us – you know!
she has been in and out of my life. I did not understand her poetry for a long time, still don’t understand a lot of it, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. I have developed a taste for the image, for the economy of words, for the beauty of the stroke of syllable that teases and leaves unsaid what lives inside.
Happy Birthday, Emily. We continue to weave your web.
–Shaun Perkins
Some of my photos from the day are below:
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 