There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
- Emily Dickenson
Emily got it right about
the slanting winter light
when the sun rolls
like a millstone
through the sky
to crush our fragile souls
as flat as shadow.
More vicious than just
darkness the way it’s sliced
by leafless saplings
into orange shards and
blackened bars across
the windows to trap us
in airless rooms
whose only sound’s
the murmuring of plainsong
in the wind.
Only Emily could
say it with the spareness
of that landscape; only Emily,
her face a flattened disk of Aten
staring sun to sun beyond
the glass, casting shadows
of her own into the
endless afternoon.
All Rights. Donald Sellitti.
Donald Sellitti is retired after a thirty-eight year career in research and teaching at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. He has published extensively in medical journals, and has recently had poems published in Autumn Sky, Snakeskin, Better than Starbucks, and others. A recent poem in Rat's Ass Review has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
