Day 3/30 - be with me


A copy of her collected poems I had since a teenager and the open page from The Gorgeous Nothings. This gorgeous book shows the slips of envelopes Emily Dickinson wrote on. She opened the envelopes and re-used them, composing the poems around these oddly shaped papers. It is fascinating.


This poet is “perfect” for Covid amidst all the kopitiam chatter of another lockdown. She lived most of her life in Massachusetts, America without stepping out of her house!
We know her posthumously from more than 1800 poems she wrote. She also wrote tons of letters and in them we know she kept deep friendships.
Her poems are wise, almost always witty, and some extremely humorous. Many of them are about death, but also nature and spirituality. This one poem is well known and very simple. I like it because in it you have such a clear sense of her playfulness and the childlike joy in this relationship - but also the yearning in that one phrase "be with me". Oh, in our digital age of WhatsApp messages, what records we are losing of the sweetest love notes, our chatty gosspiy exchanges, these snippets of lives....

 

Poem 1035 
Emily Dickinson
(1831 - 1886)

Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due -
The Frogs got Home last Week -
Are settled, and at work -
Birds, mostly back -
The Clover warm and thick -
You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me -
Yours, Fly.
This is an image of a thorn bug I found on the floor one night. What a creature!

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