Childless Woman

The womb

Rattles its pod, the moon

Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,

The roads bunched to a knot,

The knot myself,

Myself the rose you acheive—-

This body,

This ivory

Ungodly as a child's shriek.

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,

Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood—-

Taste it, dark red!

And my forest

My funeral,

And this hill and this

Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 11, 1963, London, England) American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America. She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company.”

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