Late Night Poetry #17: In The Belly of Mad Girl’s Love Song

This poem is based on a prompt from the Instagram of Winter Tangerine, a literary and arts magazine. Their prompts for America’s National Poetry Month last month were amazing, and I decided to write a poem based on the prompt: ‘You wake up in the belly of a poem. How did you get there?’ I chose to be inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song, one of my favourite poems.

I wake to the dark
in the belly of a poem.

A sinking weight,
and a blinding light.

I could see the world again,
as if from a great height,
but the stars above are waltzing,
blinking out in fires of blue and red,
and she thinks she made him up
inside her head.

Who? I want to ask,
afraid by her despair,
the dark depths
in her tempest eyes.

A scene forms and I turn away,
afraid to witness her bewitching
an intimate moment at the end of day,
but the poem demands I watch
a moon blazing with insanity.

All becomes a chaos of light and fire,
and all the world drops dead.

I am moved to tears,
by the tragedy,
of love lost
and never reconciled.

She becomes old,
withered and forgetful:
wisps of misty confusion
cloud the name of her love.

And again her grieving breath –
she thinks she made him up
inside her head.

Maybe she did,
maybe we are all figments.

The wings of an immense creature,
all golden feathers,
and a sharp wicked beak,
shatters the misty silence
in an agonised screech.

And when all’s seen,
and the poem’s said,

I close my eyes
and all the world drops dead.