slow

The wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low, –
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father’s house,
Just quartering a tree.

An awful tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre’s cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofs
And whistled in the air,
And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth.
And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;
The monster’s faded eyes
Turned slowly to his native coast,
And peace was Paradise!

The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.

She felt herself supremer, –
A raised, ethereal thing;
Henceforth for her what holiday!
Meanwhile, her wheeling king

Trailed slow along the orchards
His haughty, spangled hems,
Leaving a new necessity, –
The want of diadems!

The morning fluttered, staggered,
Felt feebly for her crown, –
Her unanointed forehead
Henceforth her only one.

The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.

The day came slow, till five o’clock,
Then sprang before the hills
Like hindered rubies, or the light
A sudden musket spills.

The purple could not keep the east,
The sunrise shook from fold,
Like breadths of topaz, packed a night,
The lady just unrolled.

The happy winds their timbrels took;
The birds, in docile rows,
Arranged themselves around their prince
(The wind is prince of those).

The orchard sparkled like a Jew, –
How mighty ‘t was, to stay
A guest in this stupendous place,
The parlor of the day!

The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.

“GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him –
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.

“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him — No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,
And then you and I were silenter.

“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended –
What could it hinder so, to say?
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow, — happy letter!

At the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Advance-Titan, Tyler Maas imagines a date with Emily Dickinson.

Tyler arrives dressed in “Zubaz pants and vintage Green Bay Packers T-shirt”, and is burdened by a little too much knowledge about “the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . . . [and] . . . BSB and N’Sync . . . [and] . . . [t]he XFL . . . [and] . . . Darva Conger . . . [and] . . . gigapets and tamigachis”, but he tries, goodness knows. He even lets her know that he thinks “her poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun” is pretty badass.”

Alas, Tyler doesn’t consummate his love for Dickinson; “[t]here will be no kiss, no sweat-soaked linen or hearty pancake breakfast. No words shall weave a poem in my likeness nor kids bear my name.”

Not a bad little story for a slow Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving read . . .

Just lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.

Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal, –
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.

When I was small, a woman died.
To-day her only boy
Went up from the Potomac,
His face all victory,

To look at her; how slowly
The seasons must have turned
Till bullets clipt an angle,
And he passed quickly round!

If pride shall be in Paradise
I never can decide;
Of their imperial conduct,
No person testified.

But proud in apparition,
That woman and her boy
Pass back and forth before my brain,
As ever in the sky.