Mary's Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity. . . .
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.
-Sylvia Plath, Ariel
This is what I first started to do when I thought about eating meat- compare deaths- a lamb to a man. Why this one and not this one? How do we feed our dogs and eat our pigs? When my sister, who works as a surgical nurse, said that one day a piece of human flesh fell on the floor during a routine surgery and if she wouldnʻt have been in that room at that time she would have thought it looked like a piece of chicken. We are all FLESH.
ReplyDeletePlath has such a variety of reference that I often get lost in the background meaning- she often references Germany and the Holocaust in her poetry so vividly, and in this poem no different "that emptied one man into space the ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent...".