Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

• Swarm - Zumbar
• Sting - Picada
• Trusty -Integres
• Daisies - Margarides
• Bruises - Morat
• Doves - Colom
• Ceiling - Caient
• Holy - Sagrada
• Wren - Reietó (ocell petit)

When man
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashed their rivers.

This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
though God
in His perversity
unties the knot.

• Shore - Costa
• Gleam - Brillant
• Milking - "Ordeñando"
• Knot - Nus
• Unleashed - Desfer

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

• Kneel - Agenollar-se
• Stockade - Limitacions
• Enema - Instrument médic
• None - Res
• Laid down - Anar a dormir
• Zeal - Gelosa
• Greed - Codiciosa
• Mercy - Pietat
• In the nick of time - Tiemps just

• To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
• The Starry Night (1961)
• All My Pretty Ones (1962)
• Live or Die (1966) - Pulitzer Prize in 1967
• Love Poems (1969)
• Mercy Street (1969) (Theater)
• Transformations (1971)
• The Book of Folly (1972)
• The Death Notebooks (1974)
• The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975 posthumou)
• 45 Mercy Street (1976 posthumou)
• Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977 posthumou)
• The Complete Poems, (1981 posthumou)

• Joey and the Birthday Present  (1974)
• The Wizard's Tears (1978 posthumou)