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
being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.
Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.