Lynda Wilde

I am Nobody! Who are You?

–to Emily Dickinson, in her own words…

Recluse, they said, watching a fly buzz
in the stillness of your room,
but the heart wants what it wants.
Your brain was wider than the sky,
in the corner bedroom of your father’s house
the one above the porch, facing west–
sunset in a cup.

Not knowing when the dawn would come,
you opened every door,
a little madness in a spring composed of nows,
and hope, the thing with feathers–
perched in your soul.

After you felt that funeral in your brain,
and mourners to and fro,
your sister found the heft of poems
your soul ajar–
your life–a loaded gun.

Sue tended you when you were ill,
washed you after death–
then chose your coffin clothes
in that certain slant of light,
and thought of wild nights–
‘Susie, we are the poets
and everyone else is prose’

You lived as Emily,
you dwelt in possibility, until
death stopped for you.
You died for beauty,
and morning without you
became a dwindled dawn.

Lynda Wilde is a Canadian writer/photographer living between the cities of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. She has published in Filling Station, Freefall, Zygote, and the Amethyst Review.