Cal Bedient

What Was to Be an Elegy for Emily Dickinson

Why should there be red shoes if the earth was never born, it was never born, and these are its red shoes, these the cerise Atlantic clouds to be taken with no comedy remainder, why should there be a suchness of the day,

when a lightning suspender is no union. Alas, the long and beautiful person is in a cold house and the slippery walks have no standing, the grass with its green javelins, the cloud’s red slaughter and the beautiful

person dead; I shall not enumerate when Uallach, daughter of Muimhneachan and chief poet of Ireland, died still thinking there were letters of the alphabet too small to detect, and had no reaction

to the surface winds of difference, no, no shaking of the head, no story when the story is the evening and the laughter of drowned children riding under water on the horses of the King

of the West.

When I met her, a year above now, she showed me the sunshine of the country and a cairn of red shoes.