Amherst

I died for beauty, but was scarce / Adjusted in the tomb, / When one who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed? / “For beauty,” I replied. / “And I for truth, – themself are one; / We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen, met a night, / We talked between the rooms, / until the moss had reached our lips, / And covered up our names.

–   –   –

The above is from Emily Dickinson of Amherst (1830 – 1886), and also from a 2019 calendar. Amherst is, among other things, a town Bruce and I walked through part of* on Route 9 last May on our mostly-pedestrian way from Provincetown to the New York State line at Hancock wearing four “9/11 TRUTH” signs. (For pix of us, look around in http://boston911truth.org/.)

Warm under a Pittsfield roof as it snows outside some 17 years and four months after the mass murder and mayhem of September 2001 that transformed much of the world and goes on murdering every day yet whose perpetrators have never been prosecuted for their federal crimes — it occurs to me that a poem, HERE, that John Keats (1795 – 1821) wrote near the end of his life may have inspired the belle of Amherst to write hers.

Thanks to Steve, Osneyda, Emily, John, Joel, Ed, Paul, Tom, David, Mick, Bruce, Kevin, Al, Chris, and the Pelham or Belchertown road angel, among others, for all your help.

— Mark

* We got a considerable lift from a road angel in a small beat-up Toyota (guessing) who knows who she is and may even be reading this if she follows the blog. We were leaning against a split-rail fence forlornly waiting for a taxi that wasn’t likely to ever come, when she appeared. She did some research online for the best place to have us spend the night and, based on that and her own experience, deposited us there. After having the desk clerk take a photo or two of the three of us on her cellphone, she was off, perhaps back to Pelham or Holyoke or Chicopee.