Lady Lazarus
BY SYLVIA PLATH
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
“Right to Life”
--Marge Piercy
A woman is not a pear treethrusting her fruit into mindless fecundityinto the world. Even pear trees bearheavily one year and rest and grow the next.An orchard gone wild drops few warm rottingfruit in the grass but the trees stretchhigh and wiry gifting the birds fortyfeet up among inch long thornsbroken atavistically from the smooth wood.
A woman is not a basket you placeyour buns in to keep them warm. Not a broodhen you can slip duck eggs under.Not the purse holding the coins ofyour descendants till you spend them in wars.Not a bank where your genes collect interestand interesting mutations in the taintedrain, anymore than you are.
You plant your corn and harvestit to eat or sell. You put the lambin the pasture to fatten and haul it into butcher for chops. You slicethe mountain in two for a road and gougethe high plains for coal and the watersrun muddy for miles and years.Fish die but you do not call them yoursunless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,fields for growing babies like iceburglettuce. You value children so dearlythat none ever go hungry, none weepwith no one to tend them when motherswork, none lack fresh fruit,none chew lead or cough to death and yourorphanages are empty. Every noon the bestrestaurants serve poor children steaks.At this moment at nine o'clock a parterais performing a table top abortion on anunwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaidany longer. In five days she will dieof tetanus and her little daughter will cryand be taken away. Next door a husbandand wife are sticking pins in the sonthey did not want. They will explainfor hours how wicked he is,how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the roseof the womb we suckled our mother's bloodand every baby born has a right to lovelike a seedling to the sun. Every baby bornunloved, unwanted, is a bill that will comedue in twenty years with interest, an angerthat must find a target, a pain that willbeget pain. A decade downstream a childscreams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,a firing squad summoned, a buttonis pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes,flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,not your uranium mine, not your calffor fattening, not your cow for milking.You may not use me as your factory.Priests and legislators do not holdshares in my womb or my mind.This is my body. If I give it to youI want it back. My lifeis a non-negotiable demand.
A woman is not a basket you placeyour buns in to keep them warm. Not a broodhen you can slip duck eggs under.Not the purse holding the coins ofyour descendants till you spend them in wars.Not a bank where your genes collect interestand interesting mutations in the taintedrain, anymore than you are.
You plant your corn and harvestit to eat or sell. You put the lambin the pasture to fatten and haul it into butcher for chops. You slicethe mountain in two for a road and gougethe high plains for coal and the watersrun muddy for miles and years.Fish die but you do not call them yoursunless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,fields for growing babies like iceburglettuce. You value children so dearlythat none ever go hungry, none weepwith no one to tend them when motherswork, none lack fresh fruit,none chew lead or cough to death and yourorphanages are empty. Every noon the bestrestaurants serve poor children steaks.At this moment at nine o'clock a parterais performing a table top abortion on anunwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaidany longer. In five days she will dieof tetanus and her little daughter will cryand be taken away. Next door a husbandand wife are sticking pins in the sonthey did not want. They will explainfor hours how wicked he is,how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the roseof the womb we suckled our mother's bloodand every baby born has a right to lovelike a seedling to the sun. Every baby bornunloved, unwanted, is a bill that will comedue in twenty years with interest, an angerthat must find a target, a pain that willbeget pain. A decade downstream a childscreams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,a firing squad summoned, a buttonis pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes,flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,not your uranium mine, not your calffor fattening, not your cow for milking.You may not use me as your factory.Priests and legislators do not holdshares in my womb or my mind.This is my body. If I give it to youI want it back. My lifeis a non-negotiable demand.
The Lovely Figure
-- Christakos Margaret
Kiss you on the cheeks, that double-round coital zone, the lovely figureI have loved over and over
In a dream of you, the lover who comes and liftseyes from the trouble of me.
Mirage, I know you're a poor fuck; what I wantis the light, the light, to wake
To a tray of eggs and coffee, newspaper with a good review and the cuckoo-sound of children
Eating in the kitchen, my empire clamouringwith good clocks.
Kiss you on the cheeks, that double-round coital zone, the lovely figureI have loved over and over
In a dream of you, the lover who comes and liftseyes from the trouble of me.
Mirage, I know you're a poor fuck; what I wantis the light, the light, to wake
To a tray of eggs and coffee, newspaper with a good review and the cuckoo-sound of children
Eating in the kitchen, my empire clamouringwith good clocks.
Countrywomen
- Katherine Mansfield
These be two
Countrywomen.
What a size!
Grand big arms
And round red faces;
Big substantial
Sit-down-places;
Great big bosoms firm as cheese
Bursting through their country jackets;
Wide big laps
And sturdy knees;
Hands outspread,
Round and rosy,
Hands to hold
A country posy
Or a baby or a lamb--
And such eyes!
Stupid, shifty, small and sly
Peeping through a slit of sty,
Squinting through their neighbours' plackets.
Countrywomen.
What a size!
Grand big arms
And round red faces;
Big substantial
Sit-down-places;
Great big bosoms firm as cheese
Bursting through their country jackets;
Wide big laps
And sturdy knees;
Hands outspread,
Round and rosy,
Hands to hold
A country posy
Or a baby or a lamb--
And such eyes!
Stupid, shifty, small and sly
Peeping through a slit of sty,
Squinting through their neighbours' plackets.
South Of My Days
- Judith Wright
South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust it's hot face in here to tell another yarn-
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy years are hived in him like old honey.
Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand-
cruel to keep them alive - and the river was dust.
Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we
brought them down, what aren't there yet. Or driving for Cobb's on the run
up from Tamworth-Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn't wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny, him on his big black horse.
Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards.
True or not, it's all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days' circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
O cold the black-frost night. The walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust it's hot face in here to tell another yarn-
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
Seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones.
Seventy years are hived in him like old honey.
Droving that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand-
cruel to keep them alive - and the river was dust.
Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down; we
brought them down, what aren't there yet. Or driving for Cobb's on the run
up from Tamworth-Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn't wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny, him on his big black horse.
Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards.
True or not, it's all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. This is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days' circle
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.
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