Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read Online Free PDF Page A

I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
    A gullible head untouched by their animosity,
    Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
    The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
    Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
    She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
    While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins
    Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
    A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
    The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
    The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
    The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?
    I am exhausted, I am exhausted –
    Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
    I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
    The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
    Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

Daddy
    You do not do, you do not do
    Any more, black shoe
    In which I have lived like a foot
    For thirty years, poor and white,
    Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
    Daddy, I have had to kill you.
    You died before I had time –
    Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
    Ghastly statue with one gray toe
    Big as a Frisco seal
    And a head in the freakish Atlantic
    Where it pours bean green over blue
    In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
    I used to pray to recover you.
    Ach, du.
    In the German tongue, in the Polish town
    Scraped flat by the roller
    Of wars, wars, wars.
    But the name of the town is common.
    My Polack friend
    Says there are a dozen or two.
    So I never could tell where you
    Put your foot, your root,
    I never could talk to you.
    The tongue stuck in my jaw.

    It stuck in a barb wire snare.
    Ich, ich, ich, ich,
    I could hardly speak.
    I thought every German was you.
    And the language obscene
    An engine, an engine
    Chuffing me off like a Jew.
    A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
    I began to talk like a Jew.
    I think I may well be a Jew.
    The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
    Are not very pure or true.
    With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
    And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
    I may be a bit of a Jew.
    I have always been scared of you,
    With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
    And your neat mustache
    And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
    Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –
    Not God but a swastika
    So black no sky could squeak through.
    Every woman adores a Fascist,
    The boot in the face, the brute
    Brute heart of a brute like you.
    You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
    In the picture I have of you,
    A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
    But no less a devil for that, no not
    Any less the black man who

    Bit my pretty red heart in two.
    I was ten when they buried you.
    At twenty I tried to die
    And get back, back, back to you.
    I thought even the bones would do.
    But they pulled me out of the sack,
    And they stuck me together with glue.
    And then I knew what to do.
    I made a model of you,
    A man in black with a Meinkampf look
    And a love of the rack and the screw.
    And I said I do, I do.
    So daddy, I’m finally through.
    The black telephone’s off at the root,
    The voices just can’t worm through.
    If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –
    The vampire who said he was you
    And drank my blood for a year,
    Seven years, if you want to know.
    Daddy, you can lie back now.
    There’s a stake in your fat black heart
    And the villagers never liked you.
    They are dancing and stamping on you.
    They always knew it was you.
    Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Lesbos
    Viciousness in the kitchen!
    The potatoes hiss.
    It is all Hollywood, windowless,
    The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
    Coy paper strips for doors –
    Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.
    And I, love, am a pathological liar,
    And my child – look at her, face down on the floor,
    Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear –
    Why she is schizophrenic,
    Her face red and white, a