poetry
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Oh softlingLittle downy cheeping oneStill warm in your pile of flakesNeither feathers nor fledging in your future Carrying all your unfulfilled eggy promise with you How a body can transmute so quicklyfrom a being to be caressed with only the gentlest of touches To a bundle of matter and the question – Where do you go now?
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Dorothy weighed optionsEach worse than the last, Sylvia saw boxesSo she turned up the gas. Edna melted her candles,Fell down the stairs in the dark. Anne wrote fairy talesBut it wasn’t a lark. Ginny’s in the river,Having gone for a swim. Sara thought she’d forgotten,But the rain did her in. Me? I’m a madwomanTrapped in
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There is no neat locus of blame anymore – the overgrown fruit has been excised.Though the belly still swells, remembering its sole occupant a pomegranate filled with rotting seeds. Too large at a pound, but too small to be weighted with the burden of the bodyof the familyof the future. Small wonder then, you should
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Blackberrying is one of my favorite Sylvia Plath poems. It’s certainly dark – there’s a sense of compression in the beginning, an almost claustrophobic paranoia as the narrator is forced alone through this dark alley, feeling watched by large dark eyes all around. But these berries aren’t hostile, despite the hooks and barbs surrounding them.
blackberry alley 