Child’s Park Stones by Sylvia Plath
In sunless air, under pines Green to the point of blackness, some Founding father set these lobed, warped stones To loom in the leaf-filtered gloom Black as the charred knuckle-bones Of a giant or extinct Animal, come from another Age, another planet surely. Flanked By the orange and fuchsia bonfire Of azaleas, sacrosanct These stones […]
“Célibataire” by Sylvia Plath
Or, cette jeune fille pointilleuse Lors d’une cérémonieuse promenade en avril Avec son dernier soupirant Fut soudain frappée, intolérablement, Par le brouhaha irrégulier des oiseaux Et par le désordre des feuilles Affligée par ce tumulte, elle Vit les gestes de son amoureux déséquilibrer l’air Sa démarche s’égarer, inégale A travers une rangée de fougères et […]
Battle-Scene From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer by Sylvia Plath
It beguiles- This little Odyssey In pink and lavender Over a surface of gently- Graded turquoise tiles That represent a sea With chequered waves and gaily Bear up the seafarer, Gaily, gaily, In his pink plume and armor. A lantern-frail Gondola of paper Ferries the fishpond Sindbad Who poises his pastel spear Toward three pinky-purple […]
Balloons by Sylvia Plath
Since Christmas they have lived with us, Guileless and clear, Oval soul-animals, Taking up half the space, Moving and rubbing on the silk Invisible air drifts, Giving a shriek and pop When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. Yellow cathead, blue fish—- Such queer moons we live with Instead of dead furniture! Straw mats, […]
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances. God’s lioness, How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees! –The furrow Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch, Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks — Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else Hauls me through […]
Apprehensions by Sylvia Plath
There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself- Infinite, green, utterly untouchable. Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also. They are my medium. The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights. A grey wall now, clawed and bloody. Is there no way out of the mind? Steps at […]
Amnesiac by Sylvia Plath
No use, no use, now, begging Recognize! There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it. Name, house, car keys, The little toy wife- Erased, sigh, sigh. Four babies and a cocker! Nurses the size of worms and a minute doctor Tuck him in. Old happenings Peel from his skin. Down […]
All The Dead Dears by Sylvia Plath
Rigged poker -stiff on her back With a granite grin This antique museum-cased lady Lies, companioned by the gimcrack Relics of a mouse and a shrew That battened for a day on her ankle-bone. These three, unmasked now, bear Dry witness To the gross eating game We’d wink at if we didn’t hear Stars grinding, […]
Aftermath by Sylvia Plath
Compelled by calamity’s magnet They loiter and stare as if the house Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke-choked closet into light; No deaths, no prodigious injuries Glut these hunters after an old meat, Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies. Mother Medea in a green smock […]
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots, Tilted and disparate, and always unstable. Touched by a match, they might warm me, And their fine lines singe The air to orange Before the distances they pin evaporate, Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color. But they only dissolve and dissolve Like a series of promises, as […]
Words by Sylvia Plath
Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes traveling Off from the center like horses. The sap Wells like tears, like the Water striving To re-establish its mirror Over the rock That drops and turns, A white skull, Eaten by weedy greens. Years later I Encounter them on the road- Words dry […]
Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed […]
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history. Full of wings, otherworldliness. In […]
Whiteness I Remember by Sylvia Plath
Whiteness being what I remember About Sam: whiteness and the great run He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but Going’s been tame deviation. White, Not of heraldic stallions: off-white Of the stable horse whose history’s Humdrum, unexceptionable, his Tried sobriety hiring him out To novices and to the timid. Yet the dapple toning his […]
Touch-And-Go by Sylvia Plath
Sing praise for statuary: For those anchored attitudes And staunch stone eyes that stare Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot At some steadfast mark Beyond the inconstant green Gallop and flick of light In this precarious park Where vivid children twirl Like colored tops through time Nor stop to understand How all their play is touch-and-go: […]
Terminal by Sylvia Plath
Riding home from credulous blue domes, the dreamer reins his waking appetite in panic at the crop of catacombs sprung up like plague of toadstools overnight: refectories where he reveled have become the holstery of worms, rapacious blades who weave within the skeleton’s white womb a caviare decay of rich brocades. Turning the tables of […]
Stopped Dead by Sylvia Plath
A squeal of brakes. Or is it a birth cry? And here we are, hung out over the dead drop Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire. And you out cold beside me in your chair. The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails. Is that Spain down there? Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals […]
Spider by Sylvia Plath
Anansi, black busybody of the folktales, You scuttle out on impulse Blunt in self-interest As a sledge hammer, as a man’s bunched fist, Yet of devils the cleverest To get your carousals told: You spun the cosmic web: you squint from center field. Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin, Notable robber baron, Behind […]
Sow by Sylvia Plath
God knows how our neighbor managed to breed His great sow: Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid In the same way He kept the sow-impounded from public stare, Prize ribbon and pig show. But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour Through his lantern-lit Maze of barns to the lintel of […]
Southern Sunrise by Sylvia Plath
Color of lemon, mango, peach, These storybook villas Still dream behind Shutters, thier balconies Fine as hand- Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch. Tilting with the winds, On arrowy stems, Pineapple-barked, A green crescent of palms Sends up its forked Firework of fronds. A quartz-clear dawn Inch by bright inch Gilds all our Avenue, And […]
Sculptor by Sylvia Plath
To his house the bodiless Come to barter endlessly Vision, wisdom, for bodies Palpable as his, and weighty. Hands moving move priestlier Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain Images of light and air But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone. Obdurate, in dense-grained wood, A bald angel blocks and shapes The flimsy light; arms folded […]
Rhyme by Sylvia Plath
I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s Honeycombed with golden eggs, Yet won’t lay one. She, addled in her goose-wit, struts The barnyard like those taloned hags Who ogle men And crimp their wrinkles in a grin, Jangling their great money bags. While I eat grits She fattens on the finest grain. Now, as I […]
Resolve by Sylvia Plath
Day of mist: day of tarnish with hands unserviceable, I wait for the milk van the one-eared cat laps its gray paw and the coal fire burns outside, the little hedge leaves are become quite yellow a milk-film blurs the empty bottles on the windowsill no glory descends two water drops poise on the arched […]
Recantation by Sylvia Plath
‘Tea leaves I’ve given up, And that crooked line On the queen’s palm Is no more my concern. On my black pilgrimage This moon-pocked crystal ball Will break before it help; Rather than croak out What’s to come, My darling ravens are flown. ‘Forswear those freezing tricks of sight And all else I’ve taught Against […]
Purdah by Sylvia Plath
Jade – Stone of the side, The antagonized Side of green Adam, I Smile, cross-legged, Enigmatical, Shifting my clarities. So valuable! How the sun polishes this shoulder! And should The moon, my Indefatigable cousin Rise, with her cancerous pallors, Dragging trees – Little bushy polyps, Little nets, My visibilities hide. I gleam like a mirror. […]
Prospect by Sylvia Plath
Among orange-tile rooftops and chimney pots the fen fog slips, gray as rats, while on spotted branch of the sycamore two black rooks hunch and darkly glare, watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic […]
Poems, Potatoes by Sylvia Plath
The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous, In establishments which imagined lines Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes, Stones, without conscience, word and line endure, Given an inch. Not that they’re gross (although Afterthought often would have them alter To delicacy, to poise) but that they Shortchange me continuously: […]
Pheasant by Sylvia Plath
You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill. It is something to own a pheasant, Or just to be visited at all. I am not mystical: it isn’t As if I […]
Parliament Hill Fields by Sylvia Plath
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack. Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue, Settling and stirring like blown paper […]
Spider by Sylvia Plath
Anansi, black busybody of the folktales, You scuttle out on impulse Blunt in self-interest As a sledge hammer, as a man’s bunched fist, Yet of devils the cleverest To get your carousals told: You spun the cosmic web: you squint from center field. Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin, Notable robber baron, Behind […]
Sow by Sylvia Plath
God knows how our neighbor managed to breed His great sow: Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid In the same way He kept the sow-impounded from public stare, Prize ribbon and pig show. But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour Through his lantern-lit Maze of barns to the lintel of […]
Southern Sunrise by Sylvia Plath
Color of lemon, mango, peach, These storybook villas Still dream behind Shutters, thier balconies Fine as hand- Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch. Tilting with the winds, On arrowy stems, Pineapple-barked, A green crescent of palms Sends up its forked Firework of fronds. A quartz-clear dawn Inch by bright inch Gilds all our Avenue, And […]
Sculptor by Sylvia Plath
To his house the bodiless Come to barter endlessly Vision, wisdom, for bodies Palpable as his, and weighty. Hands moving move priestlier Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain Images of light and air But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone. Obdurate, in dense-grained wood, A bald angel blocks and shapes The flimsy light; arms folded […]
Rhyme by Sylvia Plath
I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s Honeycombed with golden eggs, Yet won’t lay one. She, addled in her goose-wit, struts The barnyard like those taloned hags Who ogle men And crimp their wrinkles in a grin, Jangling their great money bags. While I eat grits She fattens on the finest grain. Now, as I […]
Resolve by Sylvia Plath
Day of mist: day of tarnish with hands unserviceable, I wait for the milk van the one-eared cat laps its gray paw and the coal fire burns outside, the little hedge leaves are become quite yellow a milk-film blurs the empty bottles on the windowsill no glory descends two water drops poise on the arched […]
Recantation by Sylvia Plath
‘Tea leaves I’ve given up, And that crooked line On the queen’s palm Is no more my concern. On my black pilgrimage This moon-pocked crystal ball Will break before it help; Rather than croak out What’s to come, My darling ravens are flown. ‘Forswear those freezing tricks of sight And all else I’ve taught Against […]
Purdah by Sylvia Plath
Jade – Stone of the side, The antagonized Side of green Adam, I Smile, cross-legged, Enigmatical, Shifting my clarities. So valuable! How the sun polishes this shoulder! And should The moon, my Indefatigable cousin Rise, with her cancerous pallors, Dragging trees – Little bushy polyps, Little nets, My visibilities hide. I gleam like a mirror. […]
Prospect by Sylvia Plath
Among orange-tile rooftops and chimney pots the fen fog slips, gray as rats, while on spotted branch of the sycamore two black rooks hunch and darkly glare, watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic […]
Poems, Potatoes by Sylvia Plath
The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous, In establishments which imagined lines Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes, Stones, without conscience, word and line endure, Given an inch. Not that they’re gross (although Afterthought often would have them alter To delicacy, to poise) but that they Shortchange me continuously: […]
Pheasant by Sylvia Plath
You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill. It is something to own a pheasant, Or just to be visited at all. I am not mystical: it isn’t As if I […]