Tulips
I woke up in the middle of the night, a snowstorm raging outside, my heart dark and heavy. I had read Sylvia Plath's Sheep in Fog before sleep—rookie mistake. " The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them ." What woke me up was someone in the back of my mind reading these first three lines over and over again. I lay awake in bed for some time, listerning, until she finally grew quiet, Then a craving for another of her poems crept in—my favorite, Tulips. She wrote it while she was in the hospital for appendicitis, on a snowy February day. It is red and white, warmed by the stretch of faint winter sunlight, the colors bleeding softly into each other like a watercolor painting. "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do...