80th Virtual Poetry Circle
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Welcome to the 80th Virtual Poetry Circle!
Remember, this is just for fun and is not meant to be stressful.
Keep in mind what Molly Peacock’s books suggested. Look at a line, a stanza, sentences, and images; describe what you like or don’t like; and offer an opinion. If you missed my review of her book, check it out here.
It’s a new year, and if you haven’t heard there is a new feature on the blog this year . . . my first ever, poetry reading challenge. Yup, that means everyone should be signing up because all you need to do is read 1 book of poetry, and why not start with a confessional poet, like Anne Sexton.
I'll admit I chose a poem from this author because I'll be reviewing a heartbreaking memoir from her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, that deals with depression and death on Monday.
Wanting to Die
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun.
But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body.
Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile.
To thrust all that life under your tongue!-- that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
Let me know your thoughts, ideas, feelings, impressions. Let’s have a great discussion…pick a line, pick an image, pick a sentence. I’ve you missed the other Virtual Poetry Circles. It’s never too late to join the discussion.