Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—-

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
 
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath

Lady Lazarus

   I have done it again.
   One year in every ten
   I manage it—-
  
   A sort of walking miracle, my skin
   Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
   My right foot
  
   A paperweight,
   My face a featureless, fine
   Jew linen.
  
   Peel off the napkin
   0 my enemy.
   Do I terrify?—-
  
   The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
   The sour breath
   Will vanish in a day.
  
   Soon, soon the flesh
   The grave cave ate will be
   At home on me
  
   And I a smiling woman.
   I am only thirty.
   And like the cat I have nine times to die.
  
   This is Number Three.
   What a trash
   To annihilate each decade.
  
   What a million filaments.
   The peanut-crunching crowd
   Shoves in to see
  
   Them unwrap me hand and foot
   The big strip tease.
   Gentlemen, ladies
  
   These are my hands
   My knees.
   I may be skin and bone,
  
   Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
   The first time it happened I was ten.
   It was an accident.
  
   The second time I meant
   To last it out and not come back at all.
   I rocked shut
  
   As a seashell.
   They had to call and call
   And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
  
   Dying
   Is an art, like everything else,
   I do it exceptionally well.
  
   I do it so it feels like hell.
   I do it so it feels real.
   I guess you could say I’ve a call.
  
   It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
   It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
   It’s the theatrical
  
   Comeback in broad day
   To the same place, the same face, the same brute
   Amused shout:
  
   ‘A miracle!’
   That knocks me out.
   There is a charge
  
   For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
   For the hearing of my heart—-
   It really goes.
  
   And there is a charge, a very large charge
   For a word or a touch
   Or a bit of blood
  
   Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
   So, so, Herr Doktor.
   So, Herr Enemy.
  
   I am your opus,
   I am your valuable,
   The pure gold baby
  
   That melts to a shriek.
   I turn and burn.
   Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
  
   Ash, ash —
   You poke and stir.
   Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—-
  
   A cake of soap,
   A wedding ring,
   A gold filling.
  
   Herr God, Herr Lucifer
   Beware
   Beware.
  
   Out of the ash
   I rise with my red hair
   And I eat men like air.

— Sylvia Plath

I can’t even begin to explain how I love the poetry of Sylvia Plath.  Or how amazed I am at her.  I don’t envy her.  If you want death so badly to actually stick your head into an oven, that’s totally heavy stuff.  But the poetry, man!  A poem that overflows with issues and reeks of pain and suffering but is bound loosely in very light packaging such as Lady Lazarus could come only from one of the best, if not the only one.  She talks of death and of her attempts to really die with a casual allusion to the Jews and to the Nazi as if she’s just talking about how a mundane day went by. 

But she died.  And she orchestrated the whole thing exceptionally well, indeed.