Happy Birthday Emily!

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

SLEIGH BED

 

Visiting Emily Dickinson’s home

in Amherst, Massachusetts.

 

After days divided into increments

of grocery lists, poetry and baking bread,

weary and delighted, you slip into

your dark wood single bed

and feel soft linens against your skin.

 

Did you exchange hungry kisses

with Judge Otis P. Lord on that bed?

Or, was it sacred space where

only dreams and poems were wed?

 

Harvard looted everything of yours

except this sleigh bed,

its head and foot boards slanting outward,

where you lay listening and let

the hodgepodge of eternity in.

 

 

 

                                    ~ Barbara Alfaro