If you only think of her as a shrill, suicidal writer of frenzied verse, you owe it to yourself to give her another look.
My suggestion is that you start with the Plath poem I started on, "Blackberrying," and The Bee Poems.
Today's poem will be one I wrote for her. We'll get back to Mr. Hilbert tomorrow. Today, read a poem for Sylvia.
Sylvia’s Bees
Where is the spring now,
mother?
Black and balled and fat on
syrup, we were forgotten.
In the hell of gas and words,
our faint buzz went unheard.
Sleepy in the end of Winter,
we never questioned the silence;
everyone else was hibernating
too, dumb February
with the dark slowly dying,
giving way to the glow of gold.
It was on the Feast of Fools
we first opened our eyes.
The workers' frantic dance was no
flower song, a hollow message
poured out from the ragged
wings: there were no flowers to be had.
The patterns had all changed,
the tin syrup was crust in the pan.
Where is the one who harbors
us when the world is dead?
What is this dismal place,
where the crisp calling of birds
and the taste of flowers are
dead, dead, forever dead?
There is no one now who
remembers the truth of the Summer.
We are all virgins released
into a frozen Spring.
The air is dead here, we have
no sound that is not enormous
and swallowed whole by the
empty hearts of earth and trees.
We are lost, the tin syrup
calls her name to us, the goddess;
but she is gone like the
fragrant memory of absent flowers.
Our promise is the sentence
of life and death and choice
and now we have no choice;
the nothing drones on and on.
The stale air that chokes in
its immobility stares and gapes
as the faint sound of wings
creeps in through the mossy stone
and echoes off the facets in
our now fragmented minds,
secreting the message that
somewhere beyond these walls Spring still goes on.
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