I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s
Honeycombed with golden eggs,
Yet won’t lay one.
She, addled in her goose-wit, struts
The barnyard like those talonned hags
Who ogle men
And crimp their wrinkles in a grin,
Jangling their great money bags.
While I eat grits
She fattens on the finest grain.
Now, as I hone my knife, she begs
Pardon, and that’s
So humbly done, I’d turn this keen
Steel on myself before profit
By such a rogue’s
Act, but—how those feathers shine!
Exit from a smoking slit
Her ruby dregs.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, one of America's most notorious writers, was the author of The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and several other books of poetry. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, in 1982, and her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is considered to be a modern classic. She was married to the English poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and, in 1963, took her own life.
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