Tuesday Poem: Anne Sexton

The Truth The Dead Know

Gone, I say and walk from the church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Fascinating, these two versions of the same poem, one obviously recorded before the revised version was published.