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Short poems that fit in a single scroll and still leave you rearranging your view of hope, fear, nature and death. Read them slowly, once aloud, and they get stranger.

About the author.Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems but published fewer than a dozen in her lifetime; her sister Lavinia found the rest in a locked chest after Emily died in 1886.

From the book

What keeps singing in the worst weather and never sends a bill.

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I 've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

A small, delighted conspiracy against everyone who needs to be noticed.

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there 's a pair of us -- don't tell! They 'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

An argument that your mind outweighs everything it ever looks at.

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. The brain is deeper than the sea, For, hold them, blue to blue, The one the other will absorb, As sponges, buckets do. The brain is just the weight of God, For, lift them, pound for pound, And they will differ, if they do, As syllable from sound.

Two strangers lying side by side find they gave their lives to one cause.

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, -- the two 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.

Why the scariest house is the one you carry around.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost, Than an interior confronting That whiter host. Far safer through an Abbey gallop, The stones achase, Than, moonless, one's own self encounter In lonesome place. Ourself, behind ourself concealed, Should startle most;