To a Sister

Sister of my childhood! I write
To poets of old through your eyes.
As my words or another's words
Or my unsteady pen or unsteadier type
Reaches your lovely lids and lashes,
I feel the face of cummings warm my eyes.
I hear the echo of good Sylvia,
Laughing, and dying as she laughed.
I taste the peaches, I feel the wind-swept sand
Linger between my freezing toes
As Eliot shouts out his, "hullo!"
And a lonely girl sits in a bedroom,
Rolling up her poems into tiny balls--
And I see her, and she sees me, so neither me nor her
Are quite alone any longer.
Sister, were you to leave or die some death,
These great giants of words--lonely
And lovely and all long-dead--
Would be worth nothing at all to me, nothing at all...
Except that they would all sing
A chorus of your name.