I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Poetry used by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Near the end of April 
   On the verge of May—
And o my heart, the woods were dusk 
   At the close of day.

Half a word was spoken
   Out of half a dream,
And God looked in my soul and saw 
   A dawn rise and gleam.

Near the end of April
   Twenty Mays have met,
And half a word and half a dream 
   Remember and forget.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 18, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

What we need has always been inside of us.

For some—a few poets or farmers, perhaps—

it’s always near the surface. Others, it’s buried.

It was in our original design, though—pre-machine,

pre-border, pre-pandemic. I imagine it like the light

one might feel through the body before dying,

a warm calm, a slow breath, a sweet rush.

There is, by every measure, reason for fear,

concern, a concert in the balcony of anxiety

made of what has also always been inside of us:

a kind of knowing that everything could break.

But it hasn’t quite yet and probably won’t.

What I mean to say is, I had a daydream

and got lost inside of it. There were dozens

of birds for some reason, who sounded like

they were singing in different accents:

shelter in place, shelter in place.

You’re made of stars and grace.

Stars and grace. Stars—and grace.

Originally published in MiGoZine, March 2020. Used with permission from the author.