genius

for as long as i can remember really loving literature, i have loved sylvia plath. throughout my undergrad career as an english lit major, i researched her like crazy. my coming-of-age seemed to find a new connection in every poem the woman wrote. to this day i find something new everytime i read one of her poems, and i am taken back to being 16 (oh the angst-filled teen years) and feeling like this women, this crazy women, really got me. granted, she did stick her head in an oven to kill herself, but as a teenager who really reveled in feeing depressed (it's when i wrote the best), sylvia plath was my it girl. and she still really does it for me. there's a poem for every season, every mood. here is one of my favorites. ladies just try not to feel depressed about growing older. old age rising like a terrible fish from the mirror everyday? yikes. this one is called mirror.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.