birthday letters

Ted Hughes

from Earth-Numb

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Life is trying to be life

Death also is trying to be life.
Death is in the sperm like the ancient mariner
With his horrible tale.

Death mews in the blankets - is it a kitten?
It plays with dolls but cannot get interested.
It stares at the windowlight and cannot make it out.
It wears baby clothes and is patient.
It learns to talks, watching the others' mouths.
It laughs and shouts and listens to itself numbly.
It stares at people's faces
And sees their skin like a strange moon, and stares at the grass
In its position just as yesterday.
And stares at its fingers and hears: 'Look at that child!'
Death is a changeling
Tortured by daisy chains and sunday bells
It is dragged about like a broken doll
By little girls playing at mothers and funeralls.
Death only wants to be life. It cannot quite manage.

Weeping it is weeping to be life
As for mother it cannot remember.

Death and death and death, it whispers
With eyes closed, trying to feel life

Like the shout in joy
like the glare in lightning
That empties the lonelly oak.

And that is the death

In the antlers of the Irish Elk. It is the death
In the cave-wife's needle of bone. Yet it still is not death -
or in the shark's fang which is a monument
of its lament
on a headland of life.


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Speech out of shadow


Not your eyes, but what they disguise

Not your skin, with just that texture and light
but what uses it as cosmetic

Not your nose - to be or not to be beautiful
but what it is the spy for

Not your mouth, not your lips, not their
but the maker of the digestive tract adjustments

Not your breasts
because they are diversion and deferment

Not your sexual parts, your proffered rewards
which are in the nature of a flower
technically trecherous

Not the webs of your voice, your poise, your tempo
your drug of a million micro-signals

But the purpose.

The unearthly stone in the sun.

The glare
of the falcon, behind its hood

Tamed now
to its own mystifications
and the figerings of men.


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