In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. <br />A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit <br />The wax image of myself, a doll's body. <br />Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. <br />Only the devil can eat the devil out. <br />In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire. <br /> <br />It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, <br />The cellar's belly. They've blown my sparkler out. <br />A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage. <br />What large eyes the dead have! <br />I am intimate with a hairy spirit. <br />Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar. <br /> <br />If I am a little one, I can do no harm. <br />If I don't move about, I'll knock nothing over. So I said, <br />Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain. <br />They are turning the burners up, ring after ring. <br />We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow. <br />It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth. <br /> <br />Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand: <br />I'll fly through the candle's mouth like a singeless moth. <br />Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days <br />I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone. <br />My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs. <br />I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/witch-burning/
