Replete with vacuous vanities,
we create this fearsome flood - we tread with delicious dread,
unbecoming. We destroy this dance
with stilted steps unshuttered by sunlight, unseen by laughter’s lilt.
Ragged, wretched and ravenous, in casual pursuit
of vivacious vapors, we trip over petrified wood and primordial stone;
we do not belong to this world - it does not belong to us.
Breathing seems laborious as we steal each golden hour from finality,
shuddering inside night’s delicate, ferocious depths.
The gravity curled inside a single moment’s hesitation
will be the deciding factor that delivers doom.
Still, there are fragile fragrances drifting
from these forests of reckoning - stuttered flutterings of color caress
our searching eyes, chaotic splendor ascending dusk as we determine
the fall of darkness.
We seek truths we once thought we knew before our beliefs
trembled murmurs from our mouths
as we lingered meekly within this wilderness of woe.
A sudden soothing, swirling whirlwind defines the essence
of every substance, the very sustenance
we’ve sought so fiercely under a molten moon’s wane -
this flesh rises toward eternal sunrise
as it reaches for the languid warmth of love -
sanctuary as yet undiscovered, beauty as yet unknown.
Tomorrow will not survive our bitter, grasping hands,
coming softly on silken wings as we had hoped;
all we may ever ascertain are these shivering instances of silence
hovering between each pause of uncertainty, lost from gradual grace...
Author notes
Anonymous contest
Top: graphic artist unknown
Bottom: Sylvia Plath at Smith College
Prompt #2 - Love
A Life
by Sylvia Plath
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath/poems/18897
Edge
by Sylvia Plath
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath/poems/18916
Years
by Sylvia Plath
They enter as animals from the outer
Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.
O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
What I love is
The piston in motion ----
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
There merciless churn.
And you, great Stasis ----
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful
God-bit in him
Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.
The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath/poems/18955
“Oh, god, if this is life, half heard, glimpsed...
with the god-eyed tall-minded ones,
let me never go blind, or get cut off from
the agony of learning...”
From Sylvia Plath's journal, Smith College, April 27, 1953
“Sylvia Plath 1932-63, American poet, b. Boston. Educated at Smith College and Cambridge, Plath published poems even as a child and won many academic and literary awards. Her first volume of poetry, The Colossus (1960), is at once highly disciplined, well crafted, and intensely personal; these qualities are present in all her work. Ariel (1968), considered her finest book of poetry, was written in the last months of her life and published posthumously, as were Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972). Her late poems reveal an objective detachment from life and a growing fascination with death. They are rendered with impeccable and ruthless art, describing the most extreme reaches of Plath's consciousness and passions. Her one novel, The Bell Jar (1971), originally published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1962, is autobiographical, a fictionalized account of a nervous breakdown she suffered when in college. Plath was married to the poet Ted Hughes and was the mother of two children. She committed suicide in London in Feb., 1963. Ever since, her brief life, troubled marriage, and fiercely luminous poetry have provided the raw materials for interpretation by a small army of biographers, feminists, memoirists, novelists, playwrights, scholars, and others.
Bibliography: See her collected poems (1981); occasional prose, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979); journals, ed. by T. Hughes and F. McCullough (1983); The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (2000), ed. by K. V. Kulil; biographies by E. Butscher (1979), A. Stevenson (1989), P. Alexander (1991), R. Hayman (1991), J. Rose (1991), and L. Wagner-Martin (rev. ed. 2003); J. Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994); T. Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998); D. Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage (2003); J. Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath: A Memoir (2004); studies by M. Broe (1980), J. Rosenblatt (1982), and L. Wagner-Martin, ed. (1988, repr. 1997).”
Source:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Sylvia_Plath.aspx
poems by Sylvia Plath:
http://oldpoetry.com/oauthor/show/Sylvia+Plath
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7083
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath
http://www.poemhunter.com/sylvia-plath/
YouTube readings by Sylvia Plath:
Sylvia Plath interview and "Lady Lazarus"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvBtZ3zMs6I&feature=related
“Lady Lazarus”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE
“Ariel”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJbX5o2gqhM
“Daddy”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM
“Fever 103”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgtiDvvAR8
“The Applicant”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQySAjflgnA
“November Graveyard”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ujeHnrT8A
“Parliament Hill Fields”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snEkUrme-28
“The Stones”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUpZQMeHumw
“On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up A Dryad”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL_yMbOTd8o
“Cut”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NWYF2vyIz4
“Medusa”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S63laZCOGQA
“A Birthday Present”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjHo1_W5sdg
“Nick and the Candlestick”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBIltw39gug
“Berck-Plage”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEGiXJSHN4
“Amnesiac”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfiSF8abeCM
“A Secret”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dd3oKMmKXE
“The Rabbit Catcher”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMG9sAtZdpg
“Purdah”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vogTlyORCzk
“Poppies in October”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlNP81tKdkQ
“Sylvia Plath reads from The Colussus”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njjDv3Wk1sQ
“Stopped Dead”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z562xf0HpUE
“Black Rook in Rainy Weather”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7IUhyZSj3M
“Sylvia’s Last Poem, Edge, Read by Ellen Tobie”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YHXm9oSzC8
“Smith College Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium”
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