The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton
For my Mother, born March 1902,
died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I
say and walk from church,
refusing
the stiff procession to the grave,
letting
the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is
June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive
to the Cape.
I cultivate
myself
where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the
sea swings in like an iron gate
and we
touch. In another country people die.
My darling,
the wind falls in like stones
from the
whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter
touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill
for this, or for as much.
And what
of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the
stone boats. They are more like stone
than the
sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be
blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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