Today a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), a schoolmate and life-long friend of Emily Dickinson. In 1881, after moving west, she wrote an account of the US mistreatment of American Indians, “A Century of Dishonour”. On learning of her death, Emily Dickinson said: “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her. Dear friend, I can fly – her immortal reply.”
Cheyenne Mountain
By easy slope to west as if it had
No thought, when first its soaring was begun,
Except to look devoutly to the sun,
It rises, and has risen, until, glad,
With light as with a garment, it is clad,
Each dawn, before the tardy plains have won
One ray; and after day has long been done
For us, the light doth cling reluctant, sad
To leave its brow.
Beloved mountain, I
Thy worshipper, as thou the sun’s, each morn,
My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee;
And think, as thy rose-tinted peaks I see,
That thou wert great when Homer was not born,
And ere thou change all human song shall die!
Previous poems are here.
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