CHOKED with ill weeds my garden lay a-dying,
Hard was the ground, no bud had heart to blow,
Yet shone your smile there, with your soft breath sighing:
"Have patience, for some day the flowers will grow."

Ghosts

© Anne Sexton

Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.

My Friend, My Friend

© Anne Sexton

Who will forgive me for the things I do?
With no special legend of God to refer to,
With my calm white pedigree, my yankee kin,
I think it would be better to be a Jew.

All My Pretty Ones

© Anne Sexton

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.
Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;
here, with the winner's cup at the speedboat races,
here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

England's Answer

© Rudyard Kipling

Truly ye come of The Blood; slower to bless than to ban;
Little used to lie down at the bidding of any man.
Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare;
Stark as your sons shall be - stern as your fathers were.

Young

© Anne Sexton

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer

Written For A Musician

© Vachel Lindsay

Hungry for music with a desperate hunger

I prowled abroad, I threaded through the town;

Just Once

© Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,

Brueghel's Winter

But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.

Barefoot

© Anne Sexton

Loving me with my shows off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children

The Fairy

© Charles Lamb

Said Ann to Matilda, "I wish that we knew

If what we've been reading of fairies be true.

Buying The Whore

© Anne Sexton

You stink like my Mama under your bra
and I vomit into your hand like a jackpot
its cold hard quarters.

The Building Of The Cloud-Cuckoo-Town

© Aristophanes

_Mess_.--A most amazing, astonishing work it is!
So that Theagenes and Proxenides
Might flourish and gasconade and prance away
Quite at their ease, both of them four-in-hand,
Driving abreast upon the breadth of wall,
Each in his own new chariot.