Mamacita says:  Emily Dickinson knew me, and Katie Rose IS me*; that’s the only explanation.

How else could she have. . . . known?

This first poem helped me understand faith.  The second confirmed my belief that Dickinson rocked because Katie Rose Belford and her mother both mentioned it and loved it.  And you know something; when one of a junior-high-school girl’s book heroines loved a poem, that was confirmation.  Lovesick Katie Rose confides to her mother that Dickinson’s poems help her get through hard emotional times, and Katie Rose’s mother, widowed young and left with raising six children, all with big appetites, without her husband’s life insurance because he cashed it in and put it in his just-started bookstore, and supporting them by singing and playing the piano at Guido’s Gay Nineties five nights a week, surprises Katie Rose by confiding to her that Dickinson wrote one for her, too; Mrs. Belford takes comfort in the second poem, which amazed Katie Rose.  Whoever expects one’s MOTHER to, well, understand such things?  (And oh, calloo, callay, all of the Katie Rose and Beany books have been RE-ISSUED!)

I Never Saw A Moor

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

===========================
You Left Me, Sweet, Two Legacies

You left me, sweet, two legacies,–
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

*YA fans will understand.

Two legacies. Certain of the spot.

No, YOU’RE crying a little.