Witch Burning

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.
A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit
The wax image of myself, a doll's body.
Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.
It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,
The cellar's belly. They've blown my sparkler out.
A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage.
What large eyes the dead have!
I am intimate with a hairy spirit.
Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.
If I am a little one, I can do no harm.
If I don't move about, I'll knock nothing over. So I said,
Sitting under a pot lid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.
They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.
We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.
It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.
Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
I'll fly through the candles' mouth like a singeless moth.
Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days
I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.
My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.
I am lost, I am lost, in the roves of all this light.


Sylvia Plath

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.
And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.
Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your bodys metal.
cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.
The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another
day. Your task
is to carry your life high,
and play with it, hurl it
like a voice to the clouds
so it may retrieve the light
already gone from us.
That is your fate: to live
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

Pedro Salinas
1891-1951

translated by Willis Barnstone

Women Talk

Women talk in kitchens at tables littered with children’s homework,
neglected cups of coffee and half boxes of cereal, uneaten toast and bits of paper
scrawled on in discussional graffiti. Women talk.

Women talk in living rooms with legs propped on coffee tables
or ottomans, arms draped over couch backs, hands picking absently
at worn fabric or waving the air as if to clear invisible cobwebs. Women talk.

Women talk in bedrooms swaddled in blankets or outstretched on top,
while searching through forgotten boxes or in fathomless closets,
digging through drawers or leaning on nightstands. Women talk.

Women talk in houses and cafes, on sidewalks and trails, in schoolrooms
and boardrooms, in strawberry fields and on assembly lines, hanging the wash
or scrubbing the floor, while carrying children or tottering elders. Women talk.

Women talk while the earth spins in endless orbit around a sun that
looks down upon them each day as they define the world in a torrent
of words that promote and protect, enlarge and encourage, describe and dissect.

Women talk.


Brigit Thomas, Jan. 2009

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.