To Emily, Who Heard the Quiet Things

Emily, you stitched the world into small, precise syllables, tucking eternity into lines so brief, they might be mistaken for whispers. But in your whispers, there were earthquakes, the kind that only the soul could feel. You walked the garden paths of Amherst, where bees hummed their sermons and the wind brushed secrets against your ear. Did you know your words would fly farther than the wings of any bird you watched? Recluse, they called you, as if solitude were a fault to be mended. But in your solitude, you found infinity, not in grand cathedrals but in the humblest moments— a slant of light, a spider’s thread, the fierce blooming of wildflowers in the shadows of the mind. I wonder, did the world ever feel enough for you? Or was it always “so much madness,” the kind that pressed too tightly on the edges of your heart? Yet you held it all with grace, turning chaos into crystalline truth. When you wrote that hope "is the thing with feathers," you taught us all to listen for the unseen, to feel the flutter of possibility even in the darkest hours. Your hope still perches in the hearts of many, singing softly but never ceasing. Emily, your lines are needles threading the infinite, each word a star sewn into the fabric of time. You gave us the cosmos in dashes, the universe in quiet rebellion, the courage to see beauty where the world had forgotten to look. So here’s to you, the poet who stayed while the world passed by, and yet managed to hold it all in the palm of her hand.