Sylvia Plath - Poetry's Lioness

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the..."

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:42:22 +0000

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

- Sylvia Plath (via honeyhands) (via coffeeandlipstick)

Photo

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:35:55 +0000

Stillborn

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:33:28 +0100

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air -
It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.

Photo

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:54:39 +0100

"What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do with its love?"

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:35:33 +0100

“What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do with its love?”

"I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print..."

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:59:52 +0100

“I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree”

"The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence."

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:57:42 +0100

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

Pursuit

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:51:29 +0100

There is a panther stalks me down:
One day I’ll have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving body’s bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;
Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thights.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blook;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther’s tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

ithreatenedtostapleher:ohmyveronica:(via dreamingupsidedown)

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:24:29 +0100

ithreatenedtostapleher:ohmyveronica:(via dreamingupsidedown)

Contusion

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:31:52 +0100

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.
The rest of the body is all washed out,
The color of pearl.

In a pit of rock
The sea sucks obsessively,
One hollow the whole sea’s pivot.

The size of a fly,
The doom mark
Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.

Edge

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:28:53 +0100

The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Photo

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:28:01 +0100

Poppies in July

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:27:50 +0100

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! ——————-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

"But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion."

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:27:52 +0100

“But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”

"The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm."

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:27:56 +0100

“The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm.”

Photo

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:27:55 +0100

Kindness

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:27:55 +0100

Kindness glides about my house.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit’s cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.
Sugar is a necessary fluid,

Its crystals a little poultice.
O kindness, kindness
Sweetly picking up pieces!
My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,
May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.

"Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling..."

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:26:57 +0100

“Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.”

Balloons

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:26:59 +0100

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish—-
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist

Photo

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:26:56 +0100