In ’63 with gas turned on,
Head in the oven and gone,
Her final poem bristles like a crime scene.
I scour for clues but find none,
No more than for any other cosmic lie.
I read her backwards: Ariel to Colossus,
Steaming upriver to the heart of darkness,
But no one waits for me on the jetty.
At the waul of a baby, I’m shaken awake.
My instinct is sound: read backwards.
All words begin in death.
All life, too.
Ostensibly, this poem is a response to the news that marine biologist, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, committed suicide on March 16th, 2009. But that’s just an excuse for me to ask, yet again: what is it we do when we write poetry? What is it we do when we write anything? That’s the same question that the Easter story asks. It’s a question that sets the Word and Death in conversation.