Written by
Sylvia Plath |
You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.
The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.
They've changed all that.
Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.
He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.
At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard.
.
.
I don't know a thing.
For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.
I grow backward.
I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.
Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.
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Written by
William Topaz McGonagall |
Thrice welcome home to Hawick, Mr J.
Graham Henderson,
For by your Scotch tweeds a great honour you have won;
By exhibiting your beautiful tweeds at the World's Fair
You have been elected judge of Australian and American wools while there.
You had to pass a strict examination on the wool trade,
But you have been victorious, and not the least afraid,
And has been made judge of wools by Sir Henry Truman Good,
And was thanked by Sir Henry where he stood.
You have been asked by Sir Henry to lecture on wools there,
And you have consented to do so, which made your audience stare
When you let them see the difference betwixt good wool and bad;
You'll be sure to gain fresh honours, they will feel so glad.
To think they have found a clever man indeed,
That knows good wool and how to manufacture Scotch tweed,
I wish you success for many a long day,
Because your Scotch tweeds are the best, I venture to say.
May you always be prosperous wherever you go,
Always gaining fresh friends, but never a foe,
Because you are good and a very clever man,
And to gainsay it there's few people can.
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Written by
Emily Dickinson |
Like Mighty Foot Lights -- burned the Red
At Bases of the Trees --
The far Theatricals of Day
Exhibiting -- to These --
'Twas Universe -- that did applaud --
While Chiefest -- of the Crowd --
Enabled by his Royal Dress --
Myself distinguished God --
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