For a poet with God in her typewriter…

I heard the recorded words of a great poet,

the media, as the bones, now turning to dust.

The devotees called her an intellectual force,

praised her vivid, sensitive, resonant sounds,

and celebrated her darkly profound insights.

The voice of our time, they gravely wrote,

good at poetry but not so good at living life.

Is that why she abandoned it and us so soon?

a bird choosing to plummet, rather than soar,

she sought rocky ground, rejected the free air.

Why did she discard her unique literary vision?

Perhaps the challenging clarity of her revelation

was too great a weight for a fragile mind to bear.

No rest here, even ‘with God in her typewriter’,

only the bonding atoms calling her to a reunion.

End Note: A friend asked that I transfer the contents of a flaking and ancient cassette tape to compact disc. I agreed though I suspected that it would not be an entirely pleasant experience. The recording featured the works of Anne Sexton, read by the author shortly before her suicide. Her genre, described as modern confessionalism, seems to mirror her strangely haunted life and her apparent hunger for death.

Anne Sexton [1928–1974] and Sylvia Plath [1932-1963], who also committed suicide, are widely credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell [1917-1977] and William De Witt Snodgrass [1928-2009].

From Disambiguation © Dermott Ryder