I Am Maria Inspired Elizabeth Lesser to Try Her Hand at Poetry. The Result Is a Poem That’ll Take Your Breath Away

At her first book tour stop in New York City, Maria Shriver asked her great friend, Elizabeth Lesser—a writer, founder of the Omega Institute, and an all-around extraordinary woman—to read a poem to close out the night.

“Would you share one of your poems on my book tour?” Maria asked Elizabeth a few weeks before the event.

“What poems?” Elizabeth asked. “I’m a writer and a lover of poetry, but I am not a poet.”

But, as Elizabeth said the night of the event, “Maria is a friend who gives big, and I wanted to step up for her.”

So, she tried her hand at a poem—something Maria is hoping her new book, I Am Maria, will inspire many of us to do. As Elizabeth sat down to write, she says the strangest thing happened.

"I had a visit from the muse, in the form of one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson,” says Elizabeth. “I hadn’t read I Am Maria yet. And when I sent the poem to a mutual friend, she told me that Maria had a lot of visits from Emily Dickinson as she was writing, too.”

Elizabeth graciously shared her poem with The Sunday Paper. May it get you excited to sit down to write—and stay open to what follows.

WHEN EMILY COMES TO TEA

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

                            —Emily Dickinson

 
I was twelve when Emily first came to tea.

My mother introduced her to me.

Thus began my untimely disappearing,  

My exile from gravity, my mortality fearing,

My misunderstanding, my ego’s commanding:

Be somebody, be somebody, be somebody!

When Emily’s words

First thundered in my heart: (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”)

I answered, as told, "I’m Nobody, too."

But ego rose and took up the fight,

Somebody! Nobody! Who’s wrong, who’s right?

So, I went on a quest for the rest of my days

To find my own answer to that bewildering phrase.

Just yesterday Emily came back to tea,

You already know what she said to me. 

"Who are you?” she asked, in her Zen-master tone,

And then I answered what I now know:

I'm everything and everyone, the digits and the sum

The woman and the man, the chaos and the plan

The love for my brother, the fear of the other

The corpse in the gutter, the King in the crypt

The kids caught in war, the hopeful new script.

I’m comfort and pain, famine and rain

Courage and dread, the heart and the head

I'm the bud at the flower’s birth, and her petals on the earth

I’m moss on the forest floor, and fire in the planet’s core, 

The dinosaur and the asteroid, the big bang and the void.

I’m questions with no answers, no why, no who, no how,

The entropy and syntropy, eternity and now.

I said all that to Emily.

She sipped her tea and winked at me.

"That is what I meant," she said. "That is what I meant."