Sylvia*

Beautiful are your verses
but
Lines as dreaded as Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen*
definitely are suicidal
Pangs you created
Are intense, heart-felt
Senile, sinuous, Swirling.

Your alter-ego did speak in Daddy
Laid bare the shattered, naked soul
Describing a life always hanging on a thread
which must be nightmarish
haunting, ghastly, menacing
stained confessions.

Ted Hughes loved watching you
Wonderful you looked with him
Unhappy lovers must have
glared at you two with jealousy

Animal symbolism
left Ted Hughes spellbound
Tying a second knot with it
he betrayed you or was it your
failing imagination ?

Beautiful things did end
Perhaps began your contemplation of death
You urged pills to take over
An estimation of tranquility
That is what you were up to

Poetry only made vivid the truth
you strangled,
Left the “self” forever
Flickering beyond the evening star
What remained is Ariel
encountered death your loving Ted,
obsessed still probably
with the thought-fox, crow
jaguars & pikes.
Well, how you two fell in love,
the weary world can’t remember.

• A tribute to Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, famous poet couples.
• Daddy is a confessional poem where Sylvia Plath speaks of Nazi concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen