Written by
Sylvia Plath |
Head alone shows you in the prodigious act
Of digesting what centuries alone digest:
The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,
Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts
Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white
Into salt seas.
Hercules had a simple time,
Rinsing those stables: a baby's tears would do it.
But who'd volunteer to gulp the Laocoon,
The Dying Gaul and those innumerable pietas
Festering on the dim walls of Europe's chapels,
Museums and sepulchers? You.
You
Who borrowed feathers for your feet, not lead,
Not nails, and a mirror to keep the snaky head
In safe perspective, could outface the gorgon-grimace
Of human agony: a look to numb
Limbs: not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy,
But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,
Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million
Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,
And every private twinge a hissing asp
To petrify your eyes, and every village
Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,
And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast
Anacnoda.
Imagine: the world
Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed
With suffering from conception upwards, and there
You have it in hand.
Grit in the eye or a sore
Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe
Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.
Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow
Ponderous and extend despair on earth's
Dark face.
So might rigor mortis come to stiffen
All creation, were it not for a bigger belly
Still than swallows joy.
You enter now,
Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,
And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse
To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,
A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth
Hangs in its lugubious pout.
Where are
The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?
The red, royal robes of Phedre? The tear-dazzled
Sorrows of Malfi's gentle duchess?
Gone
In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles
And sinews bunched, victorious, as the cosmic
Laugh does away with the unstitching, plaguey wounds
Of an eternal sufferer.
To you
Perseus, the palm, and may you poise
And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance
Which weighs our madness with our sanity.
|
Written by
Judith Skillman |
Herb and spine,
the flat-fisted dream
of stars and dew
formed when he walked
with his telescope
through grasses spotted
by the spit bug.
A raucous noise,
the dawn of great beauty
and he with his tripod
matting the grasses as he walked.
I never saw him dead
on a bed of white down.
Never heard past
the death rattle,
and so, for me, he lives
there in the ragged, noxious weeds
that make up North America.
He with his freely creeping root system,
milk-juiced,
the most persistent
of all my fathers
on arable lands.
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast.
Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love.
At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
in wheeling baskets.
You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch.
You sense the way we belong.
But this is an institution bed.
You will not know me very long.
The doctors are enamel.
They want to know
the facts.
They guess about the man who left me,
some pendulum soul, going the way men go
and leave you full of child.
But our case history
stays blank.
All I did was let you grow.
Now we are here for all the ward to see.
They thought I was strange, although
I never spoke a word.
I burst empty of you,
letting you see how the air is so.
The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me
and I turn my head away.
I do not know.
Yours is the only face I recognize.
Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.
Six times a day I prize
your need, the animals of your lips, your skin
growing warm and plump.
I see your eyes
lifting their tents.
They are blue stones, they begin
to outgrow their moss.
You blink in surprise
and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin,
as you trouble my silence.
I am a shelter of lies.
Should I learn to speak again, or hopeless in
such sanity will I touch some face I recognize?
Down the hall the baskets start back.
My arms
fit you like a sleeve, they hold
catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms
of your nerves, each muscle and fold
of your first days.
Your old man's face disarms
the nurses.
But the doctors return to scold
me.
I speak.
It is you my silence harms.
I should have known; I should have told
them something to write down.
My voice alarms
my throat.
"Name of father—none.
" I hold
you and name you bastard in my arms.
And now that's that.
There is nothing more
that I can say or lose.
Others have traded life before
and could not speak.
I tighten to refuse
your owling eyes, my fragile visitor.
I touch your cheeks, like flowers.
You bruise
against me.
We unlearn.
I am a shore
rocking off you.
You break from me.
I choose
your only way, my small inheritor
and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.
Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.
|
Written by
Andrew Barton Paterson |
The bell is set a-ringing, and the engine gives a toot,
There's five-and-thirty shearers here a-shearing for the loot,
So stir yourselves, you penners-up, and shove the sheep along --
The musterers are fetching them a hundred thousand strong --
And make your collie dogs speak up; what would the buyers say
In London if the wool was late this year from Castlereagh?
The man that "rung" the Tubbo shed is not the ringer here,
That stripling from the Cooma-side can teach him how to shear.
They trim away the ragged locks, and rip the cutter goes,
And leaves a track of snowy fleece from brisket to the nose;
It's lovely how they peel it off with never stop nor stay,
They're racing for the ringer's place this year at Castlereagh.
The man that keeps the cutters sharp is growling in his cage,
He's always in a hurry; and he's always in a rage --
"You clumsy-fisted mutton-heads, you'd turn a fellow sick,
You pass yourselves as shearers, you were born to swing a pick.
Another broken cutter here, that's two you've broke today,
It's awful how such crawlers come to shear at Castlereagh.
"
The youngsters picking up the fleece enjoy the merry din,
They throw the classer up the fleece, he throws it to the bin;
The pressers standing by the rack are watching for the wool,
There's room for just a couple more, the press is nearly full;
Now jump upon the lever, lads, and heave and heave away,
Another bale of golden fleece is branded "Castlereagh".
|
Written by
Carl Sandburg |
I GIVE the undertakers permission to haul my body
to the graveyard and to lay away all, the head, the
feet, the hands, all: I know there is something left
over they can not put away.
Let the nanny goats and the billy goats of the shanty
people eat the clover over my grave and if any yellow
hair or any blue smoke of flowers is good enough to grow
over me let the dirty-fisted children of the shanty
people pick these flowers.
I have had my chance to live with the people who have
too much and the people who have too little and I chose
one of the two and I have told no man why.
|
Written by
John Berryman |
An apple arc'd toward Kleitos; whose great King
wroth & of wine did study where his sword,
sneaked away, might be .
.
.
with swollen lids staggered up and clung
dim to the cloth of gold.
An un-Greek word
blister, to him guard,
and the trumpeter would not sound, fisted.
Ha,
they hustle Clitus out; by another door,
loaded, crowds he back in
who now must, chopped, fall to the spear-ax ah
grabbed from an extra by the boy-god, sore
for weapons.
For the sin:
little it is gross Henry has to say.
The King heaved.
Pluckt out, the ax-end would
he jab in his sole throat.
As if an end.
A baby, the guard may
squire him to his apartments.
Weeping & blood
wound round his one friend.
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