Somebody who should have been born is gone
Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.
Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,
its roads sunken in like a grey washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,
Somebody who should have been born is gone.
the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;
up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumplestiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.
Returning north, even the sky grew thin,
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin,
Somebody who should have been born is gone.
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward... this baby I bleed.
Anne Sexton
Shakespeare's Sister
Imagine that William Shakespeare had a sister, as
wonderfully gifted as himself. But she was not sent to school, had no chance of learning grammar and logic. Before she was out of her teens she was to be bethrothed. She cried out that marriage was hateful and for that she was severly beaten by her father. She took the road to London... stood at the stage door; she wanted to act. Men laughed in her face. At last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child and killed herself one winters night...
Virginia Woolf
