Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid

Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it

in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.

I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid

roped over my hands, heavier than lead.

My own hair was long for years.

Then I became obsessed with chopping it off,

and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty

then I am no longer beautiful.

Sylvia was beautiful, wasn’t she?

And like all of us, didn’t she wield her beauty

like a weapon? And then she married,

and laid it down, and when she was betrayed

and took it up again it was a word-weapon,

a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten

her braid to my own hair, at my nape.

I walk outside with it, through the world

of men, swinging it behind me like a tail.

Source: Poem-a-Day: May 25, 2015 (The Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org, 2015)