Read Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath for Free Online

course there are two.
    It seems perfectly natural now –
    The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
    And balled, like Blake’s,
    Who exhibits
    The birthmarks that are his trademark –
    The scald scar of water,
    The nude
    Verdigris of the condor.
    I am red meat. His beak
    Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
    He tells me how badly I photograph.
    He tells me how sweet
    The babies look in their hospital
    Icebox, a simple
    Frill at the neck,
    Then the flutings of their Ionian
    Death-gowns,
    Then two little feet.
    He does not smile or smoke.
    The other does that,
    His hair long and plausive.
    Bastard
    Masturbating a glitter,
    He wants to be loved.

    I do not stir.
    The frost makes a flower,
    The dew makes a star,
    The dead bell,
    The dead bell.
    Somebody’s done for.

Mary’s Song
    The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
    The fat
    Sacrifices its opacity …
    A window, holy gold.
    The fire makes it precious,
    The same fire
    Melting the tallow heretics,
    Ousting the Jews.
    Their thick palls float
    Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
    Germany.
    They do not die.
    Gray birds obsess my heart,
    Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
    They settle. On the high
    Precipice
    That emptied one man into space
    The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
    It is a heart,
    This holocaust I walk in,
    O golden child the world will kill and eat.

Winter Trees
    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 this, they are Ledas.
    O mother of leaves and sweetness
    Who are these pietàs?
    The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

Sheep in Fog
    The hills step off into whiteness.
    People or stars
    Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
    The train leaves a line of breath.
    O slow
    Horse the color of rust,
    Hooves, dolorous bells –
    All morning the
    Morning has been blackening,
    A flower left out.
    My bones hold a stillness, the far
    Fields melt my heart.
    They threaten
    To let me through to a heaven
    Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

The Munich Mannequins
    Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
    Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
    Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
    The tree of life and the tree of life
    Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
    The blood flood is the flood of love,
    The absolute sacrifice.
    It means: no more idols but me,
    Me and you.
    So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles
    These mannequins lean tonight
    In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,
    Naked and bald in their furs,
    Orange lollies on silver sticks,
    Intolerable, without mind.
    The snow drops its pieces of darkness,
    Nobody’s about. In the hotels
    Hands will be opening doors and setting
    Down shoes for a polish of carbon
    Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.
    O the domesticity of these windows,
    The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,
    The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.
    And the black phones on hooks

    Glittering
    Glittering and digesting
    Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

Words
    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 and riderless,
    The indefatigable hoof-taps.
    While
    From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
    Govern a life.

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