A bit of serendipity tonight as I was sitting on the couch at 9 pm trying to determine what to share for this week’s Poetry Monday. Normally, I’m ready a few days in advance but this week has been oddly busy and I was really slacking off…up until the point when I sat down and looked on the wall to our print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and suddenly remembered that there was an Anne Sexton poem that shared the same name.

The Colonel is the big Sexton fanboy in the group; I’m just an admirer. I have a theory that he has relics from the one true poet somewhere in his house. Maybe a lock of hair and a typewriter ribbon. Or maybe something more disturbing. But I digress.

Today’s poem seems to fit my seasonal mood; the days are growing shorter and the nights are growing colder, which always makes me think of the stars. Winter will forever be my season for star-gazing; the stars shine with a clear, hard light and the cold gives focus to act of watching. Some nights it feels like it’s just you and the universe. It’s on those nights that I can feel exactly what Anne was saying.

The Starry Night, Anne Sexton

The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry.