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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Snake
Elephant
Swallow
Elephants
Snakes
God
Wants
Without

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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!
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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
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The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.
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