The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery! <br />The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking. <br />There are black disks behind it, the disks of outrage, <br />And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it. <br />The disks revolve, they ask to be heard— <br /> <br />Loaded, as they are, with accounts of ****ies. <br />****ies, usages, desertions and doubleness, <br />The needle journeying in its groove, <br />Silver beast between two dark canyons, <br />A great surgeon, now a tattooist, <br /> <br />Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances, <br />The snakes, the babies, the tits <br />On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls. <br />The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak. <br />He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it. <br /> <br />So the disks of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon. <br />Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue, <br />Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out? <br />It has nine tails, it is dangerous. <br />And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going! <br /> <br />No, the tongue, too, has been put by, <br />Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon <br />And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits. <br />It is a marvelous object— <br />The things it has pierced in its time. <br /> <br />But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes? <br />Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms <br />In which a torture goes on one can only watch. <br />The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man. <br />Do not worry about the eyes— <br /> <br />They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons, <br />Their death rays folded like flags <br />Of a country no longer heard of, <br />An obstinate independency <br />Insolvent among the mountains.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-courage-of-shutting-up/
