Emily

Today is Emily Dickinson's birthday. The Emily Dickinson Museum has this gorgeous poster by Pennelope Dullaghan available. Largely ignored by publishers in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson created more than one thousand poems, some of which she gave to friends. She also wrote many pieces about travel, yet only traveled once in her lifetime. I find some of her poems almost unbearably sad, but not these two :

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog

.

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet know I how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,

Nor visited in heaven;

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the chart were given.