Poppies in July (Sylvia Plath)

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!---
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

20 July 1962

The Times Are Tidy (Sylvia Plath)

Unlucky the hero born
In this province of the stuck record
Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
And the mayor's rôtisserie turns
Round of its own accord.

There's no career in the venture
Of riding against the lizard,
Himself withered these latter-days
To leaf-size from lack of action:
History's beaten the hazard.

The last crone got burnt up
More than eight decades back
With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
But the children are better for it,
The cow milks cream an inch thick.

Monologue at 3 a.m. (Sylvia Plath)

Better that every fiber crack 
and fury make head, 
blood drenching vivid 
couch, carpet, floor 
and the snake-figured almanac 
vouching you are 
a million green counties from here, 

than to sit mute, twitching so 
under prickling stars, 
with stare, with curse 
blackening the time 
goodbyes were said, trains let go, 
and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from 
my one kingdom.