The Moss of His Skin

By Anne Sexton 1928–1974 Anne Sexton

Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes ...
Harold Feldman, “Children of the Desert”
Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958

It was only important

to smile and hold still,

to lie down beside him

and to rest awhile,

to be folded up together

as if we were silk,

to sink from the eyes of mother

and not to talk.

The black room took us

like a cave or a mouth

or an indoor belly.

I held my breath

and daddy was there,

his thumbs, his fat skull,

his teeth, his hair growing

like a field or a shawl.

I lay by the moss

of his skin until

it grew strange. My sisters

will never know that I fall

out of myself and pretend

that Allah will not see

how I hold my daddy

like an old stone tree.

Anne Sexton, “The Moss of His Skin” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Source: The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981)

Biography

Much of Anne Sexton's poetry is autobiographical and concentrates on her deeply personal feelings, especially anguish. In particular, many of her poems record her battles with mental illness. She spent many years in psychoanalysis, including several long stays in mental hospitals. As she told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: "My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and . . .

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