stuff

Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

The Break Away

Your daisies have come

on the day of my divorce:

the courtroom a cement box,

a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me

and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land

for the Jew in me,

but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—

and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors

that makes the now separate parts useless,

even to cut each other up as we did yearly

under the crayoned-in sun.

The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break

into two cans ready for recycling,

flattened tin humans

and a tin law,

even for my twenty-five years of hanging on

by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.

The gray room:

Judge, lawyer, witness

and me and invisible Skeezix,

and all the other torn

enduring the bewilderments

of their division.

Your daisies have come

on the day of my divorce.

They arrive like round yellow fish,

sucking with love at the coral of our love.

Yet they..