Anne Sexton Poems

It is not a turtle
hiding in its little green shell.
It is not a stone
...

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
...

Over stone walls and barns,
miles from the black-eyed Susans,
over circus tents and moon rockets
...

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
...

Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating all my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
...

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
...

My doctor, the comedian
I called you every time
and made you laugh yourself
when I wrote this silly rhyme...
...

A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
...

Better,
despite the worms talking to
the mare’s hoof in the field;
better,
...

We sail out of season into on oyster-gray wind,
over a terrible hardness.
Where Dickens crossed with mal de mer
in twenty weeks or twenty days
...