Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Saturday, February 23. 2013

Saturday Verse: Emily Dickinson

The Chariot (1863)


Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me -
The carriage held but just ourselves -
And immortality.


We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure, too,
For his civility -


We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done -
We passed the fields of grazing grain -
We passed the setting sun -


We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground -
The roof was scarcely visible -
The cornice but a mound -


Since then - 'tis centuries - but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity -

Posted by Bird Dog in Saturday Verse at 05:18 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Sweet Jesus, the last verse will break your heart. This woman is so quivering raw just underneath the membrane of fine English. Here's another from her, The Lightning is a Yellow Fork,
with the same motif of the most familiar even mudane moving objects --the house, home, cutlery, dinner, school kids at play --we hardly notice them as they are everyday and so seem eternal, and this feeling of the concrete ordinariness (imho she's saying) is the very opposite of the terrible truth of the lightness of our being, the truth that acknowledged as all the other truths are, would so boggle the odds in the risky gambling for love.

Speaking of which, how about Emily Dickinson for that who-would-you-want-to-be-marooned-on-an-island-with question?

===

QUOTE:
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the sky
By inadvertent fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery

Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed
The Apparatus of the Dark
To ignorance revealed.
#1 buddy larsen on 2013-02-23 10:48 (Reply)
http://mith.umd.edu//WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/Poetry/Dickinson/

--maximum minimalism of presentation
#2 buddy larsen on 2013-02-23 11:08 (Reply)

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