Love me back—and if you can’t, then say so, and let me go with whatever peace I can salvage.
Assia Wevill, “Ted Hughes, March 1968,”
She did not sign the letter but, at the bottom of the page she drew a dying bird, with outspread wings,
looking like a woman who had jumped from a roof and was flattened on the ground.
Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev, from A Lover of Unreason
I am loveless without you. I am loveless in beauty and breath; the midnight perfume of flowers—
blood on blood, with roses and more roses,
eating the red / heart, whole.
. . . A sweetness in your absence / remnants of romance; tulips and their terrors.
—Without you, love, my love,
a blood-longing remains.
. . .
I am flowerlike.
I am alone in my claret silks.
. . .
I dance myself rose-struck. I dance for hours, inside the suicidal-red,
I dance—
with blood,
with a kiss / my love-scar— my love, inside a locket.
And roses, the heart’s last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.
Ted Hughes, from Birthday Letters; “Red,”
for K. D.
A red rose, pressed with perfume of blood / love . . .
Roses that drip from my body to your body, my love, my love,
As deep as the dark—
your blood to my blood,
again, and again as blood-kisses.
I see the suicidal red—
and I see love.
Effy Winter is an American poet and scholar specializing in literary studies with a concentration on the lives and work of German writer Assia Wevill and English poet Ted Hughes. A nominee for The 2018 Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous publications. In 2022, she began pursuing her academic work in England, dividing her time between London and West Yorkshire where she studies confessional poetry at The Ted Hughes Arvon Centre for Creative Writing.
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