Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sextonwas an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 November 1928
CityNewton, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.
I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.
Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside
And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything....
the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.
My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins....
The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket....
Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?