She rises at dawn, chilled by the lost embrace of her sleeping pills, brushes
summer's blown ashes with the shuffle of footsteps on old stone floors.
She thaws her hands around a coffee cup, sits at her desk,
******* Ariel arrowed from yesterday's tide hoof-printing ocean waves jetting barnacles telephone wires a man's black boot
routing them through cold English mornings, a gold Sheaffer pen.
Words seep across the page, trail toxins of grief.
Light edges between churchyard yews, fingertips the curtains.
A thumb's worth of breast-milk stains her nightgown.
After Ted Hughes left, Sylvia was alone in the large manor house with their children Frieda and Nicholas. She wrote some of her most well-known poems between daybreak and when her children woke a few hours later.