Friday, December 30, 2005

New Sylvia Plath Poem Discovered on flyleaf of old book

Godfather

Tendril fingers rustle
In tissue wrapped
Confection like pink candy
Like lollipops for poppa
Like a regiment of maggots
Marching
Rooting
Like pigs
For truffles
Inside my rich loam
Little pulsing pricks
Push under the wire
Stealthily advancing
A perfect passchendale
Your eager fingers find me

Coming…
Ready or not

My little apricot
Split peach
Spilt wine from my
Unsucked jugs
Your piglet snout roots out
My miraculous new grown dugs
Running juice

Ho there!
Here comes the mayflower
The mormons
The ships and the slaves
Fleeing themselves
The old struggle
The daughters of Lot
Job, Silenus unsteady on his feet,
And countless thousands before him stumble and stagger in to their daughters bedroom, her boudoir, her bordello, made it so - shaped by nature - no daddy no
I am not my quisling nipples my sweating gash the verdant moss of my mound like new mown hay my moan my weakness no I am not the pinioned wings the sudden blow the feathered shaft that blood drawn cores me draws moan sigh
no
I am not these fragile clothes
that
cotton linen rustle and snap
No more rose
another
The father
god the father
coming back to another
locked room
Again and again etc etc

The above was discovered just before Christmas in a bookshop in Totnes, Devon England. Clearly fragmentary and unfinished it nevertheless has generated considerable excitement among scholars. They are hopeful that authenticity can be established through a new process called "scattering" whereby an ascending prime number of key words are carbon-dated, backed up by DNA analysis.

Happy New Year!