Susan McLean

Emily Dickinson

When she wore white, becoming the blank page,
was that a flag to signal her surrender
because she'd left no mark upon the age?
Discounted for her oddity and gender,
did she accept erasure, and retreat
to shut herself in drawers inside her room?
Or did she hope her hoarded words would meet
their maker's eye when white light scoured her tomb?

The shyness and despair that veiled her pride
could not conceal the glinting of her art,
which flashed like lightning through the darkened hour
of her impassioned nuptials, when the bride
of Calvary arrived with all her dower:
the locked chest where she kept her open heart.

Susan McLean, a retired English professor, is the author of The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and the translator of a book of Martial’s Latin poems, Selected Epigrams.  She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.