| The Poetry of Richard Sansom Published by The British Sansom Society | |
 
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| Sylvia on the Rock At Moro Bay (For Sylvia Plath) Beneath the rock at Moro Bay, stale slate walls of sky fall onto dirty sand, with cracked bottles, dead feathers, tar and trouble. Imprints of graceless forms abound in barren hillocks and reclamation sites. White gulls are gray, and gray ones black. Sylvia’s on the rock, holding her moon-white face on a tray, She smiles as the west winds tear the sky, scuttling time, and time sinks there into the nether-beaches elsewhere walked and prayed upon, heaving their loads at her feet, managing love and death. The beast of oceans fist beats on her breath. I make a small incision, an opening in the wanton air, step inside and try to hold her there, this woman of Moro Rock, this night's delusion, sister of art, and heart's confusion. Then I reach and find the night cold and black and empty. She's gone. The glass shards glisten. She's left no blood, nor would she listen. I failed to hold her here; it is the rock she needs, and I, the bright earth waking. The coolness of sweat descends at morning. On the burnished Moro Rock, a glaring silhouette of light and hope and danger, clustering near the edge, of all that's left of her indelible anger. I beg the white day's notice, a thousand voices clamoring on the sea, amid the sea-dead, jutting up like dying kelp, to give me pause in my invective. She was not human, this brief monument, cast on a continent of ruin, but she was pure, like the gold of pirate's hearts, succumbed to death before they found a shore. | |
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