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Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Childless Woman

The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
 
My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,
 
Myself the rose you acheive——
This body,
This ivory
 
Ungodly as a child’s shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,
 
Uttering nothing but blood——
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest
 
My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.

#Americans #Suicide #Women

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Admonition

If you dissect a bird To diagram the tongue You’ll cut the chord Articulating song. If you flay a beast
Daddy

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo…
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To a Jilted Lover

Cold on my narrow cot I lie and in sorrow look through my window—square of black: figured in the midnight sky, a mosaic of stars
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Brasilia

Will they occur, These people with torso of steel Winged elbows and eyeholes Awaiting masses Of cloud to give them expression,
The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the bridge… The rector, the midwife, the sexto… In my sleeveless summery dress I… And they are all gloved and covere… They are smiling and taking out ve…
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Maudlin

Mud-mattressed under the sign of t… In a clench of blood, the sleep-ta… Gibbets with her curse the moon’s… ****-bearing Jack in his crackless… Hatched with a claret hogshead to…
The Lady and the Earthenware Head

Fired in sanguine clay, the model… Fit nowhere: thumbed out as a clas… By a casual friend, it stood Obtrusive in the long bookshelf, s… Thick volumes of prose—
Resolve

Day of mist: day of tarnish with hands unserviceable, I wait for the milk van the one—eared cat
The Jailer

My night sweats grease his breakfa… The same placard of blue fog is wh… With the same trees and headstones… Is that all he can come up with, The rattler of keys?
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All the Dead Dears

In the Archæological Museum in C… coffin of the fourth century A.D.… of a woman, a mouse and a shrew. T… woman has been slightly gnawed. Rigged poker —stiff on her back
Event

How the elements solidify! —— The moonlight, that chalk cliff In whose rift we lie Back to back. I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo.
Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no… Whatever I see I swallow immediat… Just as it is, unmisted by love or… I am not cruel, only truthful— The eye of a little god, four-corn…
 2
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Sculptor

To his house the bodiless Come to barter endlessly Vision, wisdom, for bodies Palpable as his, and weighty. Hands moving move priestlier
Barren Woman

Empty, I echo to the least footfa… Museum without statues, grand with… In my courtyard a fountain leaps a… Nun—hearted and blind to the world… Exhale their pallor like scent.
Magnolia Shoals

Up here among the gull cries we stroll through a maze of pale red-mottled relics, shells, claws as if it were summer still. That season has turned its back.



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