Fifty Years On
I missed a sad anniversary yesterday. Fifty years ago, on 11th February 1963, the poet Sylvia Plath took her own life by putting her head in a gas oven. I’ve posted this poem before, but make no apology for posting it again as an act of remembrance..
They enter as animals from the outer
Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.
O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
What I love is
The piston in motion —-
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless churn.
And you, great Stasis —-
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful
God-bit in him
Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.
The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.
by Sylvia Plath (1932-63). Rest in peace.
In the Dark 
February 13, 2013 at 4:41 am
How horribly sad. By a weird coincidence, the 2/11/63 was also historically significant because the Beatles recorded their classic album Please Please Me all in a single marathon one-day session.