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Edited on Fri Mar-07-08 06:05 PM by BlueIris
"Survivor"
I am hostile to ghosts
though I know it isn't fair—
I am here and they are there,
like Sylvia Plath, who would be
only a little younger if she'd lived,
thickened up and wrinkled,
no longer golden.
Or Anne Sexton, who was born like me
in 1928 and lived to be only a little
over forty-five.
If they'd only toughened up
and stayed the course, they'd be old now
with liver spots and wattled necks,
and more and more poems.
But, instead, they are shades,
more alive than when they were living.
It seems so strange that I, who had to hide
the knives, refuse to learn to shoot,
ignore the knots they teach you to make
in Girl Scouts, who quickly poked
the used razor blades down into those nasty
little slots in the razor-blade box, or stood
poised at windows more than once, shaken
and pale, had to be blind to cans of roach
powder and lye, who swallowed a dozen pills
once, but didn't die, lives on in this world
with all its ills, and only a little worse
for wear.
There is no virtue in surviving, takes only
sheer stupid guts, some call courage,
but it isn't, though whatever it is,
all survivors have it. Call it curiosity,
cussedness, a perverted sense of humor, pride.
We can almost die laughing, thinking of ourselves,
ludicrous, prone, like Juliet
in the tomb, dead for no good reason,
with all the other melancholy fools.
So we decide to live on.
—Irene Rouse
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