Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)
American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
You said you would kill it this morning.
Do not kill it. It startles me still,
The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing
The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
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.
I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.
So many of us!
So many of us!
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.
Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.
I didn't feel like asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake. I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over — dead white, of course, with no makeup and form the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.