Goodbye Poetry Month! Hello Cupertino Poetry Lovers!

In honor of the last day of "April is Poetry Month," I am happy to join the Cupertino Patch blogger community with a little poem by Emily Dickinson. 

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know -

Yellow is one of my favorite colors and I'm always delighted to find it in a poem. 

I moved to Cupertino with my parents and sister in 1973. I graduated from Monta Vista High School, moved away in 1982, and then moved back again in 1993 with my husband. One of the most vivid memories I have of being a teenager in this town is of the fields of wild yellow mustard under the orchards along Rainbow Drive and Tantau Avenue.

One cool thing about this poem is that the poet reminds us how looking at one beautiful thing (the yellow lane) can lead us to see other beautiful things (the purple wood). It's a little tricky to understand everything Emily Dickinson captures in this poem, but here's one way I think about it.

Imagine you're leaving a beautiful place, thinking back about how sweet the flowers smelled or how happy the birds sounded. Does that beauty -- the sights, sounds, smells -- last after you leave? It's impossible to know. But you have carried that loveliness with you in your imagination. 

There are no longer many orchards or fields of yellow mustard in Cupertino. But I keep them both in my memory and in my imagination. This poem speaks to me of that possibility.