The Tender Place  (From Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes, 1998 , Faber & Faber.)

Your temples, where the hair crowded in, 
Were the tender place. Once to check 
I dropped a file across the electrodes 
of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded 
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up. 
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed 
The thunderbolt into your skull. 
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces, 
They hovered again 
To see how you were, in your straps. 
Whether your teeth were still whole. 
The hand on the calibrated lever 
Again feeling nothing 
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel 
Some squirm of sensation. Terror 
Was the cloud of you 
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw 
An oak limb sheared at a bang. 
You your Daddy's leg. How many seizures 
Did you suffer this god to grab you 
By the roots of the hair? The reports 
Escaped back into clouds. What went up 
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper 
And the nerve threw off its skin 
Like a burning child 
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you 
A rigid bent bit of wire 
Across the Boston City grid. The lights 
In the Senate House dipped 
As your voice dived inwards 
Right through the bolt-hole basement. 
Came up, years later, 
Over-exposed, like an X-ray -- 
Brain-map still dark-patched 
With the scorched-earth scars 
Of your retreat. And your words, 
Faces reversed from the light, 
Holding in their entrails. 

Ted Hughes last work was an anthology for/about  his late wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Hughes speaks of the electro-convulsive therapy that Plath had had as a young woman, part of a lifelong battle against mental illness that culminated in her suicide.

Perfect Light

There you are, in all your innocence, 
Sitting among your daffodils, as in a picture 
Posed as for the title: "Innocence". 
Perfect light in your face lights it up 
Like a daffodil. Like any one of those daffodils 
It was to be your only April on earth 
Among your daffodils. In your arms, 
Like a teddy bear, your new son, 
Only a few weeks into his innocence. 
Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait. 
And beside you, laughing up at you, 
Your daughter, barely two. Like a daffodil 
You turn your face down to her, saying something. 
Your words were lost in the camera. 
                                               And the knowledge
Inside the hill on which you are sitting, 
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house, 
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment, 
Coming towards you like an infantryman 
Returning slowly out of no-man's-land, 
Bowed under something, never reached you -- 
Simply melted into the perfect light.