April 18, 2005: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath
Morning Song
Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
[This is a poem about motherhood (and accompanying conflicted
feelings), and I adore it. Nobody but nobody sounds like this.]
MORE LIKE THIS (poems to daughters):
— To a Daughter Leaving Home, by Linda Pasta
— To A Sad Daughter, by Michael Ondaatje
— The Writer, by Richard Wilbur
