Poeticous Logo
en
English Español Français Italiano
Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

An Obsessive Combination of Onotological Inscape, Trickery and Love

Busy, with an idea for a code, I write
signals hurrying from left to right,
or right to left, by obscure routes,
for my own reasons; taking a word like writes
down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.

Other works by Anne Sexton...
Self in 1958

What is reality? I am a plaster doll; I pose with eyes that cut open without la… upon some shellacked and grinning… eyes that open, blue, steel, and c…
 10
Live

Well, death’s been here for a long time — it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye
Flee on Your Donkey

Because there was no other place to flee to, I came back to the scene of the di… came back last night at midnight, arriving in the thick June night
Boys Flying Kites, by Candido Portinari
The Kite

Here, in front of the summer hotel the beach waits like an altar. We are lying on a cloth of sand while the Atlantic noon stains the world in light.
 1
The Firebombers

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like caulif… The bomb opens like a shoebox.
The Evil Seekers

We are born with luck which is to say with gold in our m… As new and smooth as a grape, as pure as a pond in Alaska, as good as the stem of a green bea…
 1
The Witch's Life

When I was a child there was an old woman in our neig… All day she peered from her second… window from behind the wrinkled curtains
 2
Just Once

Just once I knew what life was fo… In Boston, quite suddenly, I unde… walked there along the Charles Ri… watched the lights copying themsel… all neoned and strobe—hearted, ope…
The Death King

I hired a carpenter to build my coffin and last night I lay in it, braced by a pillow, sniffing the wood,
Separation, by Edvard Munch
Divorce

I have killed our lives together, axed off each head, with their poor blue eyes stuck in… rolling separately down the drive. I have killed all the good things,
 2
The Ambition Bird

So it has come to this insomnia at 3:15 A.M., the clock tolling its engine like a frog following a sundial yet having an electric
 1
Menstruation at Forty

I was thinking of a son. The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling, but in the eleventh month of its l… I feel the November
Elizabeth Gone

You lay in the nest of your real d… Beyond the print of my nervous fin… Where they touched your moving hea… Your old skin puckering, your lung… Grown baby short as you looked up…
Elegy in the Classroom

In the thin classroom, where your… was noble and your words were all… I find this boily creature in your… find you disarranged, squatting on… irrefutably placed up there,
The Fury of Sunrises

Darkness as black as your eyelid, poketricks of stars, the yellow mouth, the smell of a stranger,



Top