The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?

disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions; we mask our past in the green of eden, pretend future’s shining fruit can sprout from the navel of this present waste.

I When in good humor, Give grass its green Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun With gold; Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold Absolute power To boycott color and forbid any flower To be.

‘In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through.’

However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks Hived like honey in your head.