For memories of teenage jobs and all that looking back from a different vantage, from the Faber and Faber first edition of Crossing the Water.
from The Babysitters / by Sylvia Plath
It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.
The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.
For an almost happy poem, a wishful, wistful poem, from the 1972 Harper & Row first edition of Winter Trees.
from Child / by Sylvia Plath
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with colors and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose names you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little
Stalk
For another favorite poem with a bit of Roethke in it, and a poem which reminds me of the few days of my life I spent in Ireland, one of them in a cottage overlooking the edge of the sea and a stretch of grass ghosted in barely-moving sheets of sheep, from the Faber “paper covered” edition of Ariel.
from Sheep in Fog / by Sylvia Plath
Hooves, dolorous bells —
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
For casts and of course Plath’s cast grew a mind of its own, from The London Magazine, February 1962, an issue in which she shares pg. 15 with her husband, Ted Hughes.
from In Plaster / by Sylvia Plath
Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain
For a favorite poem and a week of Plath and sudden sightings of light that often count for signs, from The Collected Poems.
from Black Rook in Rainy Weather / by Sylvia Plath
Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
For my friends at St. Brigid Press, and for a pretty, signed, Faber and Faber Limited first-edition of The Spirit Level, from a time when I could afford such things.
from A Brigid’s Girdle / by Seamus Heaney
Now it’s St. Brigid’s Day and the first snowdrop
in County Wicklow, and this is a Brigid’s Girdle
I’m plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop
(Like one of those old crinolines they’d trindle),
Twisted straw that’s lifted in a circle
To handsel and to heal, a rite of spring
As strange and lightsome and traditional
As the motions you go through going through the thing.
For scribes for which Heaney has an argument here, from Opened Ground.
from The Scribes / by Seamus Heaney
I never warmed to them.
If they were excellent they were petulant
and jaggy as the holly tree
they rendered down for ink.
For the mysteries of nests, from Opened Ground.
from Nesting-Ground / by Seamus Heaney
As he stood sentry, gazing, waiting, he thought of putting his ear to one of the abandoned holes and listening for the silence underground.
For summer and Heaney, from Opened Ground.
from Summer Home / by Seamus Heaney
Bushing the door, my arms full
of wild cherry and rhododendron,
I hear her small lost weeping
through the hall
For let’s make a week of Heaney, from Opened Ground.
from Bogland / by Seamus Heaney
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up,
An astounding crate full of air.
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