Poetry Friday: As Imperceptibly as Grief, Emily Dickinson

Yowza, I missed two Poetry Fridays in a row! Where have I been? What have I been doing!? Let's see. Living (with caveats ... pandemic, you know), teaching, writing, baking (sans flour), prepping for the Catholic Moms' Summit, and trying to retrain my mind to really read a book. (Reading in the time of Covid ... whoosh, it's been a whole thing for me. Or rather, the lack of the thing. I have read far fewer books in the last six months than at any other time I can think of. I. Don't. Like. That.) 

Time to get back to my favorite thing to do on a Friday: share some poetry. 

And autumn is here! Autumn is here! Though we still have to deal with the torpor of a pandemic, at least the torpor of summer is folding in on itself. Yes, it's been hot here this week, but, hey, hot? Your days are numbered. 

"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?" cried Daisy, "and the day after that, and the next thirty years?" 

 "Don't be morbid," Jordan said. "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." 

 ~~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I don't think another Poetry Friday should pass without my sharing this one from Emily Dickinson. I've loved it for forty years. Or something like that. (The years tend to lapse away, imperceptibly, and it's hard to keep track anymore.) 

As imperceptibly as grief 

by Emily Dickinson 

As imperceptibly as grief

The summer lapsed away, —

Too imperceptible, at last,

To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,

As twilight long begun,

Or Nature, spending with herself

Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,

The morning foreign shone, —

A courteous, yet harrowing grace,

As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,

Or service of a keel,

Our summer made her light escape

Into the beautiful.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jone Rush MacCulloch has the Poetry Friday round-up this week.