jazzy_dave | Poems of The Week

Old Age Gets Up

by Ted Hughes

Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks

An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention

The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on

Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from the blurred accident
Of having lived, the fatal, real injury
Under the amnesia

Something tries to save itself-searches
For defenses-but words evade
Like flies with their own notions

Old age slowly gets dressed
Heavily dosed with death's night
Sits on the bed's edge

Pulls its pieces together
Loosely tucks in its shirt

To Sylvia Plath

by Yahia Lababidi

Sleepwalking she prepared breakfast
for her still dreaming children, before
breaking fast, to satisfy her appetite

no fire needed, she all-consuming flame
bravely cowered on the kitchen floor
and slaked an antique thirst on vapor

laying her dream-tormented head to rest
she took premature or belated leave, set
out to sea, having found no harbor here.