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I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.

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
Listen
Slide
Dies
Slides
Better
Corpses
Great
Worms
Would
Sigh
Think
Believed
Thinking
Anymore
Daisies
Like
Ears
Corpse

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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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I like you your eyes are full of language. [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.
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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
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I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.
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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside
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Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
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In a dream you are never eighty.
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
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