Dear Emily

Dear Emily, where were you when we found your poems in the drawer

of your sunlit house, where many a soul that lived there was no more;

where the hearth, now void of heat, by which you wrote still sits,

waiting for a mistress that preferred a life beyond the grave to the life before it;

where nothing could tempt you or take you as much as Death could, and would;

where just outside the picket fence, in his faithful carriage of smoke and flame,

you sat with Death and Immortality, and let them stake their claim?

You let the beasts of the carriage lumber on their way,

you knew that with the setting sun, there’d be no brighter day,

for night would soon fall and darkness would ensue,

and with it, you’d let your pallid friend, with his ebony cloak, embrace you.

Your skin would pale to the colour of your gown,

and carriage, beasts rearing their heads, would plummet down,

to below the cemetery that you often admired from your room.

The artist met her muse that night, in a home below her tomb.

Written by Serina Welikala

Inspired by Emily Dickinson's poem, ‘Because I could not stop for Death,’ I began this letter, honouring Dickinson's view that Earth was only a waiting room for her to exist, before she could transcend (or rather descend) to somewhere beyond the grave. Maybe it was because she was surrounded by the ghosts of loved ones that she closely associated love with death and death with love, and thus romanticised her inevitable reunion with her family or the dark-cloaked figure that kept taking them away.