Frenemies, Part III

I used to hate poetry universally, but over the years I’ve *slowly* come to *occasionally* appreciate the way poets are able to articulate ideas and emotions I’m dispossessed of words to properly express. From time to time I’ll be grabbing coffee with a friend—trying to piece together a word of encouragement, or struggling to properly explain my hot mess of a life, or failing to put words to gratitude or hope or pain—and a snippet of a poem will come to mind, an epiphany, a perfect encapsulation of empathy I could never achieve on my own. I’m stopped dead in my tracks at the significance of pronounced emotion, and I’m grateful for the staggering power of the written word.

Today I’m feelin The Rival by Sylvia Plath, and want to celebrate it here.

You can read more about my reluctant friendship with poetry here, and you can see more poems I love to not hate here.

* * *

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

—Sylvia Plath