Welcome back to the Daily Palm here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is

December 13th, 2019. Earlier this week on Tuesday, on the 10th, it was Emily Dickinson's birthday.

She was born December 10th, 1830. She is one of the more popular, well-remembered, beloved, I guess all those

words are just as if it looked like I was just looking at a thesaurus. But the point is,

she is one of the most beloved poems, poets in American literature, in the history of American

letters. And of course, it being the week of her birthday, I wanted to share one of her

poems with you. I've shared several before, and rightly so. But what I'm going to do today is

grab my Everyman's Pocket Library collection of Dickinson's poems. They have those beautiful

little pocketbooks with the nice dust jackets on them,

really nice cloth-bound.

One of the great pocket-sized books, great for taking me on a trip or whatever.

They have a lot of different collections, seasonal collections, holiday collections,

and of course collections by various poets.

What I'm going to do today is I'm just going to open up,

whatever poem I open up to is the one that I'm going to read on the podcast today.

I have not done this ahead of time, so I don't know what I'm about to read.

I have not prepared for this, for better or for worse.

To my editor, Logan, I apologize for any mistakes I make along the way.

But here we go. I'm opening my Emily Dickinson,

Everyman's Pocket Library Collection,

and I'm just kind of flipping through the pages

so I don't just open right to the middle.

...