point shirley

• bir sylvia plath şiiri..
  
  from water-tower hill to the brick prison
  the shingle booms, bickering under
  the sea's collapse.
  snowcakes break and welter. this year
  the gritted wave leaps
  the seawall and drops onto a bier
  of quahog chips,
  leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten
  
  in my grandmother's sand yard. she is dead,
  whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
  kept house against
  what the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
  squall waves once danced
  ship timbers in through the cellar window;
  a thresh-tailed, lanced
  shark littered in the geranium bed ---
  
  such collusion of mulish elements
  she wore her broom straws to the nub.
  twenty years out
  of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab
  stucco socket
  the purple egg-stones: from great head's knob
  to the filled-in gut
  the sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.
  
  nobody wintering now behind
  the planked-up windows where she set
  her wheat loaves
  and apple cakes to cool. what is it
  survives, grieves
  so, battered, obstinate spit
  of gravel? the waves'
  spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,
  
  grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
  a labor of love, and that labor lost.
  steadily the sea
  eats at point shirley. she died blessed,
  and i come by
  bones, only bones, pawed and tossed,
  a dog-faced sea.
  the sun sinks under boston, bloody red.
  
  i would get from these dry-papped stones
  the milk your love instilled in them.
  the black ducks dive.
  and though your graciousness might stream,
  and i contrive,
  grandmother, stones are nothing of home
  to that spumiest dove.
  against both bar and tower the black sea runs.
• "bu hafta sonu bir şiir bitirdim, "point shirley, revisited", büyükannem üzerine. katı biçimsel yapısına rağmen tuhaf biçimde güçlü ve dokunaklı benim için. hatırlatıcı. öyle tek boyutlu değil." sylvia plath - the journals of sylvia plath