Author’s Note

I have lived my life with ghosts in the room. Some of them were mine. Some belonged to women who died before I was born. This poem is my conversation with Sylvia Plath—not as an idol, but as a mother of language, a keeper of the raw and the unbearable. She never wrote for me, and yet her words built a room I have lived in for decades. This is my answer back, from the daughter she never met.

Invocation

Sylvia, I call you forth not to mourn, but to witness—
to stand beside me as I open the ribcage,
spill the ink,
and show the world what it means to write as if the page were the last breath left in your lungs.

The Daughter of Plath
Poetry by Rowan Evans

I was born with a beehive in my chest,
buzzing with grief I never earned—
a secondhand sorrow, wrapped in red silk,
left at the altar of my ribs.

Sylvia,
you baptized me in bell jars,
taught me how to scream without sound,
how to find God
in the burn of a typewriter ribbon.

Your ache became heirloom—
stitched into the marrow of my metaphors,
your ghost weeps beside me as I write,
fingertips trailing flame
across the spine of each stanza.

Where you were the furnace,
I am the cathedral built from your ash—
my altar bears the relics of your ruin:
a curl of smoke,
a sliver of moon-bitten mirror,
a lullaby made of broken clocks.

I do not flinch from the blood on the page.
I have inked it into scripture.
This is how I pray—
with a pen between my teeth
and my pulse pressed
against the confessional.

You gave me your hunger for beauty
and your curse of seeing too much—
the world peeled back to its nerve endings,
the holiness inside horror.

I walk your tightrope—
between divine tenderness and obliteration,
a daughter of fire
learning to breathe the blaze
instead of be consumed.

I do not write to be saved.
I write because you weren’t.
Because I am.

And because the ache still speaks.
And I,
your heir in ink,
refuse to silence it.

Benediction

May every woman who writes in the dark know that she is not alone.
May the ache be carried, not as a wound, but as a torch.
And may we—your daughters, your sisters, your shadows—
write not to be saved,
but because we are still here,
and the ink is still warm.

Read Next: A Journey Through Ink & Flame

If The Daughter of Plath stirred your soul, consider stepping softly into these sacred spaces:

Love Over Apathy — Fierce devotion born from the ashes of indifference.

13 Riddles for the Starborn Child — Whispers of whimsy and wonder from Roo the Poet’s dreamscape.

Hymn & Heresy — A confessional hymn that dares to worship the shadows.

Or dive deep into the full archive at The Library of Ashes.

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