TO EMILY DICKINSON, ON THE DEATH OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR

by Anne Myles

I’m thinking of you, centaur sister,

and of this other, lost now—

stripped words beating meters

against God’s battlements

Young I discovered both of you,

needing the keen of it—

hymns of love ingathered

only in separation

Two queens I can’t approach,

though I too felt the rising

to stitch the rage with beauty,

to feel my throat open

in despised prophecy–

flames of our temperament leaping

in stony rooms of limitation,

clawed by what we cannot name—

Both of you dead in your fifties

while I scan a new horizon—

still looking for that vanishing green

pasture to lie down in

Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.

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