Poetry on the Back of a Cake

A Poetry Tale about Emily Dickinson, told by Hello Doggo.

Some poets need a desk with a view. Emily Dickinson made do with a recipe for coconut cake.

It still survives. Missus Carmichael’s coconut cake: one cup of coconut, two cups of flour, two eggs, and so on. No oven instructions. Presumably you just knew.

Turn it over, and there’s a poem. The things that never can come back, are several. Childhood. Some forms of hope. The dead.

Which is quite a thing to find on the back of a cake.

But she really could bake. In eighteen fifty-six her rye and Indian bread took second prize at the Amherst Cattle Show. Second! Though some retellings say one of the judges was her sister Lavinia, so make of that what you will.

Her father, according to family lore, would eat bread made by nobody else.

And then there’s the basket. The neighbourhood children remembered it. One of them, MacGregor Jenkins, wrote it up decades later: the famous recluse, at an upstairs window, lowering gingerbread down to them in a basket.

Now, that’s an old man’s memory of childhood, so allow it a little sugar.

Still. The woman who wouldn’t come downstairs to visitors was posting cake out of the window. And writing about the dead on the back of a recipe.

As she put it elsewhere: I taste a liquor never brewed.

Clearly. She was too busy baking.