Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category
Her pilgrim soul
W.B. YEATS
When I was young I greatly admired the poem When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats, the middle verse of which I quote:
How many loved your glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Now I’m getting to be quite old myself and well, it has more meaning for me and I still like it.
DETAIL OF CARTOON by LEONARDO DA VINCI
I wish I had a Sivia Plath
I wish I had a Silvia Plath
Mournfully sings Ryan Adams
On his best-selling album Gold.
I know exactly how he feels.
I too wish I had a Silvia Plath
We too would drink Martinis
Very dry – three parts gin
And drink them
In front of a portrait of
Antonio Benedetto Carpano
The inventor of vermouth
And discuss her art and sullen craft
And how she became a legend
Converting trauma
Into triumphant and terrible words
And why she described Ariel
As a blood-jet.
SILVIA PLATH
And I’m sure she would agree
To me paying tribute to her
With her last prescient
And perfect poem:
Edge
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.
