Friday, May 20, 2011

Poetry By Sylvia

I have always had an intense fascination for poet, Sylvia Plath. I think it is mainly due to the fact that she was so unstable and always wrote the most amazing, disturbed poetry. She inspired me to live out of the box when it came to my painting, I learnt from her that it's not so much about pretty pictures as it is about raw emotion and depth. Pain can too be beautiful. Her poem "Mushrooms" is what inspired my only poem ever published, when I was 16. Her work is spectacular. She was an extremely eccentric person, who was often hugely mis-understood. And as a result she lived a very depressed life and eventually committed suicide, (using her gas oven) at the young age of 30. Such a tragic end to such a talented woman. Sigh, take a load off and read a few of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. G x x x



Cut by Sylvia Plath


What a thrill ----

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge


Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.


Little pilgrim,

The Indian's axed your scalp.

Your turkey wattle

Carpet rolls


Straight from the heart.

I step on it,

Clutching my bottle

Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap

A million soldiers run,

Redcoats, every one.


Whose side are they one?

O my

Homunculus, I am ill.

I have taken a pill to kill


The thin

Papery feeling.

Saboteur,

Kamikaze man ----


The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan

Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence


How you jump ----

Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,

Thumb stump.


Never Try To Trick Me With A Kiss by Sylvia Plath


Never try to trick me with a kiss

Pretending that the birds are here to stay;

The dying man will scoff and scorn at this.


A stone can masquerade where no heart is

And virgins rise where lustful Venus lay:

Never try to trick me with a kiss.


Our noble doctor claims the pain is his,

While stricken patients let him have his say;

The dying man will scoff and scorn at this.


Each virile bachelor dreads paralysis,

The old maid in the gable cries all day:

Never try to trick me with a kiss.


The suave eternal serpents promise bliss

To mortal children longing to be gay;

The dying man will scoff and scorn at this.


Sooner or later something goes amiss;

The singing birds pack up and fly away;

So never try to trick me with a kiss:

The dying man will scoff and scorn at this.



Child by Sylvia Plath


Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

I want to fill it with color and ducks,

The zoo of the new


Whose name you meditate --

April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

Little


Stalk without wrinkle,

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical


Not this troublous

Wringing of hands, this dark

Ceiling without a star.



Daddy by Sylvia Plath


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.


Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time ----

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal


And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.


In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend


Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.


It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene


An engine, an engine,

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.


The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.


I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You ----


Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.


You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who


Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.


But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look


And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.


If I've killed one man, I've killed two ----

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.


There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagersnever liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.


Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath


Overnight, very

Whitely, discreetly,

Very quietly


Our toes, our noses

Take hold on the loam,

Acquire the air.


Nobody sees us,

Stops us, betrays us;

The small grains make room.


Soft fists insist on

Heaving the needles,

The leafy bedding,


Even the paving.

Our hammers, our rams,

Earless and eyeless,


Perfectly voiceless,

Widen the crannies,

Shoulder through holes. We


Diet on water,

On crumbs of shadow,

Bland-mannered, asking


Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!


We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,


Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:


We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door.

No comments:

Post a Comment