Anne Sexton - The awful rowing toward God

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My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Anne Sexton
There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God give milk
and I have the pail.

Anne Sexton
Bless all useful objects,
the spoons made of bone,
the mattress I cook my dreams upon,
the typewriter that is my church
with an altar of keys always waiting.

Anne Sexton
O fallen angel,
the companion within me,
whisper something holy
before you pinch me
into the grave.

Anne Sexton
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

Anne Sexton
It is a dead heart.
It is inside of me.
It is a stranger
yet once it was agreeable,
opening and closing like a clam.

Anne Sexton
It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.

Anne Sexton
Stop the darkness and its amputations
and find the real McCoy
in the private holiness
of my hands.

Anne Sexton
If you meet a cross-eyed person
you must plunge into the grass,
alongside the chilly ants,
fish through the green fingernails
and come up with the four-leaf clover....

Anne Sexton
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.
Perhaps for a death.

Anne Sexton
Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have....

Anne Sexton
Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.

Anne Sexton
Nature is full of teeth
that come in one by one, then
decay,
fall out.

Anne Sexton
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.

Anne Sexton
Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change.

Anne Sexton
I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

Anne Sexton
You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.

Anne Sexton
But even in a telephone booth
evil can seep out of the receiver
and we must cover it with a mattress,
and then tear it from its roots
and bury it,
bury it.

Anne Sexton
If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.

Anne Sexton
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.

Anne Sexton
My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web.

Anne Sexton
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

Anne Sexton
To be without God is to be a snake
who wants to swallow an elephant.

Anne Sexton
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.

Anne Sexton
The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

Anne Sexton
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

Anne Sexton
God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Anne Sexton
The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

Anne Sexton
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.

Anne Sexton
The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Anne Sexton