Emily Dickinson Visits Pamela Sinicrope Poem by Daniel Brick

A Fantasy for Pam

You are here in your house
with your sons and your husband
and all the arrangements you have made
with furniture, fabrics and designs
to make this house also this home.
And I have the sudden realization
you have opened a gate to Eden
and invited me into the Garden.
Pamela, you and I have an ideal rapport,
like spring and summer in all of their essentials
or tree roots with soil as they fan out
through the ground for the sake of trunk,
limbs and leaves. Oh, so much joy resides
in service! Surely you feel it too.

I learned early to cherish small things,
humble, precious things, and people
who smile when they call themselves NOBODIES.
There are so many connections everywhere
we are never really alone. The children in my neighborhood,
boisterous, carefree, in the flush of innocence,
arrive at the steps of my house in Amherst. They turn
their expectant faces upward until I appear
on the small balcony. Then they cheer and dance a little.
I slowly lower a basket by a rope, and it dangles slightly
as it reaches their tiny arms. The oldest one cradles the basket,
as they disappear with many thank-you's cast over their
disappearing backs. When they reach their private place -
we adults do not know its location! - they untie the ribbon,
and there are the gingerbread cookies I baked for them
this morning. Of course, they share these gifts equally.
Sharing is half of their pleasure.

But there is an additional gift they sometimes find,
but other times miss. I enclose a brief poem I composed
while the cookies baked. Verses that take me no longer
to imagine than the cookies to bake. Did I not say
I appreciate small things, and I sense their smallness
is a disguise. It disguises things destined to grow greater
than seems possible. Is that not the same faith you have
in your sons? That you had when love first flowered
between you and your husband? That you felt swell inside
your mind when you wrote your first poems? These things bless
our lives which are always growing toward some new wonder,
some fresh beauty. We are summoned to such joy. It is our birthright.