Today is my birthday. Whee.

We went to the beach. I read my blog post from two years ago and saw I did the same exact thing I did this past weekend — Rehoboth, skee ball, relaxing on the beach. One difference is that I had an extremely appreciative audience member when I won all the stuffed animals at skee ball this time around.

Please read below for my poetry question to you.

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One of my life challenges is handling my own cognitive blindness. I want to know what I don’t know. I want to find out if I need or want to know it. But if I don’t know it, how can I know?

If you don’t have a headache yet, then congratulations.

This really does have to do with poetry.

I’m taking a workshop now and the instructor shared an Anne Sexton poem that I had never read before:

Bayonet by Anne Sexton

What can I do with this bayonet?
Make a rose bush of it?
Poke it into the moon?
Shave my legs with its silver?
Spear a goldfish?
No. No.

It was made
in my dream
for you.
My eyes were closed.
I was curled fetally
and yet I held a bayonet
that was for the earth of your stomach.
The belly button singing its puzzle.
The intestines winding like alpine roads.
It was made to enter you
as you have entered me
and to cut the daylight into you
and let out your buried heartland,
to let out the spoon you have fed me with,
to let out the bird that said fuck you,
to carve him onto a sculpture until he is white
and I could put him on a shelf,
an object unthinking as a stone,
but with all the vibrations
of a crucifix.

The playfulness of the first stanza appealed to me — partly because it starts out as playful and then turns more serious as the speaker mentions internal organs. The choice of a bayonet interested me, because it’s old-fashioned equipment. Perhaps it’s not too dangerous in war, but it could be very dangerous in a ‘war’ of one or two people.

What is a poem you were shown (or discovered on your own) that you wish you’d known about earlier?