This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. <br />I have whirled the midwife's extractor, <br />I have my honey, <br />Six jars of it, <br />Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar, <br /> <br />Wintering in a dark without window <br />At the heart of the house <br />Next to the last tenant's rancid jam <br />and the bottles of empty glitters ---- <br />Sir So-and-so's gin. <br /> <br />This is the room I have never been in <br />This is the room I could never breathe in. <br />The black bunched in there like a bat, <br />No light <br />But the torch and its faint <br /> <br />Chinese yellow on appalling objects ---- <br />Black asininity. Decay. <br />Possession. <br />It is they who own me. <br />Neither cruel nor indifferent, <br /> <br />Only ignorant. <br />This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees <br />So slow I hardly know them, <br />Filing like soldiers <br />To the syrup tin <br /> <br />To make up for the honey I've taken. <br />Tate and Lyle keeps them going, <br />The refined snow. <br />It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers. <br />They take it. The cold sets in. <br /> <br />Now they ball in a mass, <br />Black <br />Mind against all that white. <br />The smile of the snow is white. <br />It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen, <br /> <br />Into which, on warm days, <br />They can only carry their dead. <br />The bees are all women, <br />Maids and the long royal lady. <br />They have got rid of the men, <br /> <br />The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. <br />Winter is for women ---- <br />The woman, still at her knitting, <br />At the cradle of Spanis walnut, <br />Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. <br /> <br />Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas <br />Succeed in banking their fires <br />To enter another year? <br />What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? <br />The bees are flying. They taste the spring.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/wintering/
