She Dealt Her Pretty Words Like Blades
by Emily Dickinson
She dealt her pretty words like Blades —
How glittering they shone —
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone —
She never deemed — she hurt —
That — is not Steel’s Affair —
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh —
How ill the Creatures bear —
To Ache is human — not polite —
The Film upon the eye
Mortality’s old Custom —
Just locking up — to Die.
To Emily “Dealing Pretty Words Like Blades“
Were you, would you, alive in this dying age
As the cameras of the hour hungrily follow in eager reportage
‘… Bodies stacked deep along the wall…’
(Unnoticed high in the hills winter comes down final and cirrus
With the spiral rising of migrant swallows)
Find your lively voice to hide it
Uncharacteristic of today’s roles and ways?
Or would rude society and video intrude
To take you, like so many, from yourself
Nor let you so tenderly to brood?
Our confusion at the quickness in your pastoral meandering
Staples our hearts like your reported hand stirring in the letterbox.
The unlettered box which defers our hands
We obey without question.
Trespassing in confusion, we do not understand
The indictment in our arrested attention.
Now, nearly out of our sight,
Heard occasionally but not seen,
Could you have been moved to cry out,
Or would public expedition of your voice have vexed and tested
Your measured record into silence?
This calls not your courage into question,
Nor your stamina against the ordinary troubles of the heart,
But asks of your reflection,
Could it have untangled from data overload
(Rewind not being permitted for random files)
Demand of spirit from demand of share and board?
As though wondermongering were not another commodity
Wherein memoirs of solitude or high-tech expedition
Are means and mechanism for self-promotion,
Of calling to oneself wealth and glitter, the rewards of public attention,
I wish to memorialize you anew, and emulate
If not your half-blessed childlessness, your unslanted view,
And should I learn to sing to them,
I would call sons and daughters after you.
This One & This One 