Written by
Sylvia Plath |
Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color.
The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,
This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.
I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,
And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it ----
My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.
O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
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Written by
Sharon Olds |
Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.
Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing
In some antechamber - servants, half-
Listening for the bell.
Sometimes I see them lying like love letters
In the Dead Letter Office
And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.
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Written by
Erin Belieu |
Make your daily monument the Ego,
use a masochist's epistemology
of shame and dog-eared certainty
that others less exacting might forgo.
If memory's an elephant, then feed
the animal.
Resist revision: the stand
of feral raspberry, contraband
fruit the crows stole, ferrying seed
for miles .
.
.
No.
It was a broken hedge,
not beautiful, sunlight tacking
its leafy gut in loose sutures.
Lacking
imagination, you'll take the pledge
to remember - not the sexy, new
idea of history, each moment
swamped in legend, liable to judgment
and erosion; still, an appealing view,
to draft our lives, a series of vignettes
where endings could be substituted -
your father, unconvoluted
by desire, not grown bonsai in regret,
the bedroom of blue flowers left intact.
The room was nearly dark, the streetlight
a sentinel at the white curtain, its night
face implicated.
Do not retract
this.
Something did happen.
You recall,
can feel a stumbling over wet ground,
the cave the needled branches made around
your body, the creature you couldn't console.
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