May 2020
(After Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night")
Van Gogh's "Starry Night"
illumines a damaged heart.
Poetry remains therapy
until the patient is cured.
Pulitzer Prize, parties, men
and accolades galore.
Anne Sexton, the poets' darling,
dances to the darkening sky.
This is how you want to die.
This is how the world ends:
without swirling stars,
without a crescent moon,
stuck alone inside your garage,
door closed, car running.
Inhale the aroma of the blackened night.
Van Gogh's "Starry Night"
illumines a damaged heart.
Poetry remains therapy
until the patient is cured.
Pulitzer Prize, parties, men
and accolades galore.
Anne Sexton, the poets' darling,
dances to the darkening sky.
This is how you want to die.
This is how the world ends:
without swirling stars,
without a crescent moon,
stuck alone inside your garage,
door closed, car running.
Inhale the aroma of the blackened night.
Anne Sexton, 1928-1974, was among the highly personal confessional poets of the 1950s and '60s, along with Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and others. She started writing poetry at her psychotherapist's behest. But she was deeply troubled, and, like Plath, could not fight her way out of her despair. She committed suicide by asphyxiation.in her garage at her Weston, Mass. home.
