versification

emily dickenson writes: Mr. Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? as a first gesture from writer to reader. I think it is a very beautiful thing to say.

sometimes I think when I was little something was taken from me, and in its place I got words that I could use to say secret things, to call to the thing that was lost, and the girl. even now, when I got to the page, it is with this idea that I'm returning something; that there has been an exchange of a sort, and I'm complicit in an economy I could never fully understand.