1314: Her Kind | Anne Sexton

[exceptindreams]

"Her Kind"
Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

On this day in...
2010: "A Future Congressman" by Charles Bukowski and "A Story That Could Be True" by William Stafford
2009: "Atlas" by U.A. Fanthorpe
2008: "On Living" by Nazim Hikmet
2007: Weekend, no poem

If you have seen the snow/somewhere slowly fall/on a bicycle,/then you understand/all beauty will be lost,/and how even that loss/can be beautiful.