Friday Poem

[intertext]

For lidocafe, who has given birth twice, will soon be a grandmother, has been feeling down lately, but may be cheered by beauty.

MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, 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 (from Ariel)

Comments

[lidocafe.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I have always loved the opening line of this poem, a typically Plathonic figure of speech).

I'll post a childbirth poem I'm teaching this term. I'm sure it will shock a few kids.

Hmmm, I think Plathonic should be a word to go along with Derridean and Kafkaesque.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

yes, better than Plathtic (haha)

I love the last stanza of this poem. "clean as a cat's" and "the clear vowels rise like balloons."