Childless Woman
By Sylvia Plath
The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,
Myself the rose you acheive—-
This body,
This ivory
Ungodly as a child’s shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,
Uttering nothing but blood—-
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest
My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.
Copyright © The Estate of Sylvia Plath.
