Anne Sexton - The Children lyrics

The children are all crying in their pens and the surf carries their cries away. They are old men who have seen too much, their mouths are full of dirty clothes, the tongues poverty, tears like puss. The surf pushes their cries back. Listen. They are bewitched. They are writing down their life on the wings of an elf who then dissolves. They are writing down their life on a century fallen to ruin. They are writing down their life on the bomb of an alien God. I am too. We must get help. The children are dying in their pens. Their bodies are crumbling. Their tongues are twisting backwards. There is a certain ritual to it. There is a dance they do in their pens. Their mouths are immense. They are swallowing monster hearts. So is my mouth. Listen. We must all stop dying in the little ways, in the craters of hate, in the potholes of indifference- a murder in the temple. The place I live in is a maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home. Yet if I could listen to the bulldog courage of those children and turn inward into the plague of my soul with more eyes than the stars I could melt the darkness- as suddenly as that time when an awful headache goes away or someone puts out the fire- and stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.