Plath

[Henk Klok]

Een aantal (autobiografische) gedichten van de Amerikaanse schrijfster en dichteres Sylvia Plath:

Stings

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,  
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.  
He and I
   
Have a thousand clean cells between us,  
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,  
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it  
   
Thinking 'Sweetness, sweetness'.
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells  
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?  
Is there any queen at all in it?
   
If there is, she is old,  
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush?  
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column  
   
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.  
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust  
And dried plates with my dense hair.
   
And seen my strangeness evaporate,  
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,  
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?  
   
It is almost over.
I am in control.  
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,  
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
   
To scour the creaming crests  
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.  
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone  
   
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,  
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.  
He was sweet,
   
The sweat of his efforts a rain  
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,  
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.  
   
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.  
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,  
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
   
Now she is flying  
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet  
Over the engine that killed her?
The mausoleum, the wax house.

 

The Beekeeper's Daughter

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest ---

A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

6 October 1962



The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the
      villagers --
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is