Pilgrimage

(poem post & photo diary)

Heptonstall, England

I.

Shoving the yellowed paper into my pocket,
ripped from a worn out copy, I walked
northwest of the valley and

up,
up,
up.

Street level low windows
glow buttery & warm
in the gray morning light,
melting into the stone set roads—
mismatched puzzle pieces
paving, weaving, between
terraced homes. A hall of mirrors.

Tailors of old used
those thick panes to
work by, in the fading
golden hours and then
by candlelight.

On the edge of town
are the bones of a church.
Sitting in its shell, little pearl
in this open-air cathedral,
stone cold on my skin,
I look up.

Distant moon, pale fingernail,
barely visible in the blue,
framed by flower blooms
in the eaves.

Here the gravestones are reclined,
worn smooth by so many feet, knit together
by yellowing grass; River Styx
come earth-side.

II.

It is raining.
My flip-flops squelch
through waist high grass growing
between upright, fresher graves.

It is for the transatlantic poet,
my patron saint, that I came here.
Zealous disciple, emptying my pockets
for a rabbit’s foot.

“Foolish Enough to Be a Poet”
reads the epitaph beside me,
ignoring the sentiment I take
too personally.

A voice cuts through the wet air—
knife sharp, so clean I do not yet feel it.
Then the rush of red. “She is here.”
my companion calls, waving me over there.

The half moon of her grave is littered
with trinkets and offerings.
Pebbles and coins crown her headstone.
Dozens of pencils, marbles, roses,
and red ribbons line the length of her.

Plain black letters bear her vandalized name.
From my pocket I pull the poem
torn from Ariel, fold it, and write “thank you”
Just another contribution beneath those bold letters:

EVEN AMIDST FIERCE FLAMES
THE GOLDEN LOTUS CAN BE PLANTED.

-britta jenson pitzl

---

American poet, Sylvia Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963 in her home in Primrose Hill, London, England. She was only thirty.

Photo diary of my pilgrimage, 2015
as photographed by my traveling companion, Laura Harris

Me at Sylvia Plath’s grave

The ruins of Church of St Thomas a’ Becket, Heptonstall, England. Built between 1256-1260, it was destroyed in a storm in 1847.

The church’s bell tower

A street in Heptonstall. I found the exact same angle of this street in a picture in a Plath biography years later. Wild.

Another angle of the church

Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall

love you x

-b