Mirror

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

Happy Birthday Sylvia Plath

Tomorrow is Sylvia Plath's birthday.  She was born in 1932 in Massachusetts.  She was a confessional poet and I read before that she would write a piece straight off and it would be complete to her.   Despite a suicide attempt while in college she graduated with honours from Smith and obtained a Fulbright scholarship to study in Cambridge.

At Cambridge she met the poet Ted Hughes whom she married and bore two children for.  The couple split in 1962.  It was one of the coldest winters in recent history and Plath's depression returned as she cared for her two very young children alone.  In early 1963 she committed suicide by placing her head in an oven and inhaling carbon monoxide fumes.  She was 30 years old.

Plath is remembered for her novel The Bell Jar, her first collection The Colossus and her posthumous collection Ariel.  Poems I like by her are Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Mirror and Morning Song.  My favourites by her are Blackberrying and Poppies in October.  There is something wonderful about some of her poems and I have a place in my heart for Plath though she makes me sad, she is like an old friend.  Happy birthday chick!

Poppies in October

By Sylvia Plath

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --


A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky


Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.


O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.