Aftermath

Compelled by calamity's magnet

They loiter and stare as if the house

Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought

Some scandal might any minute ooze

From a smoke-choked closet into light;

No deaths, no prodigious injuries

Glut these hunters after an old meat,

Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock

Moves humbly as any housewife through

Her ruined apartments, taking stock

Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:

Cheated of the pyre and the rack,

The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 11, 1963, London, England) American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America. She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company.”

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Aftermath

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