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
The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
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.
When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing....
Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs....
It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle....
Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.