Her kind, our kind

We at Brightly are just shivering with delight as we celebrate the birthday of a most-beloved fab gal poet and scorpio sister, Anne Sexton, born on November 9, 1928, to Ralph and Mary Harvey in the idyllic just-past-Wellesley Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. What city services does Newton offer its (presumably not dead-by-their-own hand, or dead at all) residents, you might very well ask yourself? Plenty, it seems.

Anne is suffocatingly superb. This certainly is not Precious Moments poetry:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind


And, of course, the Dickinsonian oracle -- twelve-fingered if it has any fingers at all -- offers this Sextonian birthday profession:

I heard a fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
(E. Dickinson, from 591)