Death's diviner Classifying

Emily Dickinson - Poem 836:

 

Color - Caste - Denomination -

These - are Time's Affair -

Death's diviner Classifying

Does not know they are -

 

As in sleep - all Hue forgotten -

Tenets - put behind -

Death's large - Democratic fingers

Rub away the Brand -

 

If Circassian - He is careless -

If He put away

Chrysalis of Blonde - or Umber -

Equal Butterfly -

 

They emerge from His Obscuring -

What Death - knows so well -

Our minuter intuitions -

Deem unplausible

 

How much we need to understand and affirm these words today! Perhaps another way of putting it is that all our differences in this temporal body are nothing when compared with our Unity of Being. If we see ourselves as Divine Consciousness living through our temporary bodily state, then it changes our perspective immediately.

 

I have a veritable library on Emily Dickinson. One retired Humanities professor, R.C. Allen, describes her as a Bodhisattva - an embodiment of Eternal Compassion (Emily Dickinson: Accidental Buddhist, Trafford Publishing, 2007). Indeed, she has been described as a therapist of the soul, one who understands the depth of psychological suffering and her poems administer the cure.

Done