Serendipity

quatre.

Thank you Shuen-Yi for the restored edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel - reading the collection in its original order and manuscript sheds light on Plath's creative process, techniques and more powerfully, how she painfully battled with the inner demon and transcended it all.

My all time favourite is the Morning Song, written when her second son Nicholas was just born.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.