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
For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
O starry night, This is how I want to die
I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.
I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover....
My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.
When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.