The Bell Jar Poem by Derrick Puente

The Bell Jar



Distortion descends in this fatal haven
Palpable as an irreverent dream
Wisdom supreme, electric it seems
Go on then, I shall quote the raven

The dykes broke and the darkness seized
Like a lover who knows to descend
When ungovernable truth, deadens the roots
Masking itself artlessly

Lady Lazarus sleeps in a landscape of snow
Bland and stopped as a dead baby sleeping
Ariel's plea, under the mirror-like sea
Lies behind the stores of the past

The vulnerable are always with us,
In their acres of misgivings and doubts
Partial to rain, the rebirth in pain
The psychic regenerate route

Unpublished words are as no words at all
The writer breathes in the reading
The ritualizing of print, awakens the flint
And the colossus can stand proud and tall

The stifling lure, of new fabled cures
Supplementing the suppliants needs
Yet dread as she was, it was only because
For her art she could only bleed

In the bell jar, mischievous minds
Can't contain their plans of escaping
When it descends, look to no end
Hope goes on, waiting and waiting

Like heresy's need to be free
The soul cannot live as a slave
When the mind is a master, whose sadist ways
Points directly to the mouth of the grave.

POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
For Sylvia Plath, always
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