emilys garden
the world, it’s influencing me less.
i am grateful to influence it more.
when i can be at home
having good thoughts
for the world every six hours,
i like it like that.
when i can be at home
writing e-mails to hundreds
of people, it seems like
a very good idea.
when i can be at home
not having to get all entangled
with what seems to be going on out there,
it offers a view that’s creative.
not to say i don’t
ever go out anymore.
that’s not true.
i just don’t race
around like i used to.
i don’t have to be
on my way someplace to think
i am going somewhere.
i don’t need to be at the airport
to consider myself a big player.
i seem to be
more like Emily Dickenson,
who hardly left her yard.
she didn’t suffer.
neither did the world.
her poetry about life,
flowers, trees, and bees,
told a story of what
was happening
outside her yard.
once in Amherst, i went to visit her garden.
i saw the big tree that was a little tree,
when she was there.
i saw her bedroom down the hall
a short way from her parents room.
i saw her little white lace dress.
i was stunned to see
how tiny she was, as a body,
since her poems point out so far.
she didn’t leave her yard to get them
people wrote to her. . .
people came to visit. . .
people told her stuff. . .
she said a lot in what she wrote
leaving her property, didn’t provoke it.
it came to her.
she didn’t have to be
somewhere else to get it.
it got her.
someone told me once,
while screaming at me ,
“you live in your own little world
up on top of that hill.”
every morning, i wake up
and give thanks for days
i don’t have to
go anywhere else but here.
i love this little world.
it’s taken a long time
to get it to be here.
i think Emily was on to something,
her garden wasn’t really all that small!
-toni stone
