Wait Mister. Which way is home? They turned the light out and the dark is moving in the corner. There are no sign posts in this room, four ladies, over eighty, in diapers every one of them. La la la, Oh music swims back to me and I can feel the tune they played the night they left me in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing and everyone here was crazy. I liked it and danced in a circle. Music pours over the sense and in a funny way music sees more than I. I mean it remembers better; remembers the first night here. It was the strangled cold of November; even the stars were strapped in the sky and that moon too bright forking through the bars to stick me with a singing in the head. I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m. and there are no signs to tell the way, just the radio beating to itself and the song that remembers more than I. Oh, la la la, this music swims back to me. The night I came I danced a circle and was not afraid. Mister?

From The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). ©1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was an American poet of the Confessional school. Throughout her life she had severe depression and was hospitalised on several occasions. She began writing poetry while recovering after a suicide attempt in 1956, as suggested by her therapist, Dr Martin Orne, and almost instantly won great acclaim – her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), was critically praised and nominated for a National Book Award. Sexton's poetry explored childhood guilt, mental illness, motherhood and female sexuality in a candid and unflinching way (she thought that poetry ‘should almost hurt’), and is characterised by musical rhythms and striking imagery. She died by asphyxiating herself.

Researched by Kasia Krawczyk. Other poems by Anne Sexton have featured in the November 2008 and October 2009 issues of the Journal.