Sylvia Plath as an Old Story Title for…

Tell it this way: depression is the 30cm nail driving into the walls.

If you ever read about Plath, ever kept a lantern from dying,

ever tended a garden it grew so wild to swallow god, ever kept

dressing the fire in your bones, then you must know about grief,

possibly how to end it. Maami once stood in this garden. Now,

I stand in her shadow like a sphinx in a crusade of an inferno.

In Lagos, another news says a student of microbiology, 400L, took

a nook’s way to the sky, death could not stop for him—anymore.

Let’s agree: failure is the arm swinging the pendulum across the face

of every dream. These gardens grow wild & the birds unfurl their

wings into an offering of flight. My cousin knelt in this garden once.

I kowtow into his absence, my knees—eyes dressed in dust & dearth.

In my mouth, every name glistens with a beak. I owe every wall

a shadow, every bed a midnight of creaks & crimson, every heart

an arrhythmia twice the speed of a destrier. In the library, my finger

Canterburies through The Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath, for once in

my whole life, I recite “Lady Lazarus” & remember I have a father

growing in the garden. Do I terrify?—what fear sweeps this little life?

Tainted black & bruised, a chorus lifts itself onto my mouth’s blade:

dy—dying is an art, so just like everything else I do it exceptionally well, yelz

yet even with honey disguised in holocaust, who, tell me, wants to die this young?

Source: Poetry (February 2020)