Morning Song - Poetry by Sylvia Plath

 

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch,

The midwife slapped your foot soles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

~ Sylvia Plath ~

The Night Dances

A smile fell in the grass.

Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances

Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals --

Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely

Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass

Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.

Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself --

Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off --

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Why am I given

These lamps, these planets

Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white

On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.

Nowhere.

~Sylvia Plath ~

BIO: Born in Massachusetts in 1932, Sylvia Plath suffered deeply from depression, which she wrote about in her celebrated book, The Bell Jar. Her poetry collections include The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and The Collected Poems, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She was married to poet Ted Hughes and committed suicide by gas inhalation in London in 1963.