Selected Poems of May Sarton

I do not have to love you

As I loved her,

To be devastated, but,

Angel and surgeon of the psyche,

I am free to love you now

Outside all the myths,

The confused dreams,

Beyond all the barriers,

In the warm natural light

Of simple day.

I am allowed to give you

Unstrained, flowing,

Wise-infant

To wise-mother love.

Nostalgia for India

In the clean, anodyne

Hotel room in Athens,

I am suddenly homesick for

The Indian night

And my dark cell

In Orissa

Where I was visited

By a white lizard

With emerald eyes,

By an articulate frog,

And sometimes, very late,

By a wandering shrew.

How will you fashion love, how will you wake and keep

The pride, the purity of a great image freed of its emotion?

It’s life we harvest here

(Sun on the crimson vine).

On Being Given Time

Sometimes it seems to be the inmost land

All children still inhabit when alone.

They play the game of morning without end,

And only lunch can bring them, startled, home

Bearing in triumph a small speckled stone.

Yet even for them, too much dispersal scatters;

What complex form the simplest game may hold!

And all we know of time that really matters

We’ve learned from moving clouds and waters

Where we see form and motion lightly meld.

Not the clock’s tick and its relentless bind

But the long ripple that opens out beyond

The duck as he swims down the tranquil pond,

Or when a wandering, falling leaf may find

And follow the formal downpath of the wind.

It is, perhaps, our most complex creation,

A lovely skill we spend a lifetime learning,

Something between the world of pure sensation

And the world of pure thought, a new relation,

As if we held in balance the globe turning.

Even a year’s not long, yet moments are.

This moment, yours and mine, and always given,

When the leaf falls, the ripple opens far,

How rich and long the hours become,

How brief the years,

In this house of gathering,

This life about to enter its seventh decade.

I live like a baby

Who bursts into laughter

At a sunbeam on the wall,

Or like a very old woman

Entranced by the prick of stars

Through the leaves.

And now, as the fruit gathers

All the riches of summer

Into its compact world,

I feel richer than ever before,

And breathe a larger air.

I am not ready to die,

But I am learning to trust death

As I have trusted life.

I am moving

Toward a new freedom

Born of detachment,

And a sweeter grace—

Learning to let go.

I am not ready to die,

But as I approach sixty

I turn my face toward the sea.

I shall go where tides replace time,

Where my world will open to a far horizon

Over the floating, never-still flux and change.

I shall go with the changes,

I shall look far out over golden grasses

And blue waters

There are no farewells.

Praise God for His mercies,

For His austere demands,

For His light

And for His darkness.

I came here to create a world

As strong, renewable, fertile,

As the world of nature all around me—

Learned to clear myself as I have cleared the pasture,

Learned to wait,

This is the time when voyagers return

With a mad longing for known customs and things

Strangers

There have been two strangers

Who met within a wood

And looked once at each other

Where they stood.

And there have been two strangers

Who met among the heather

And did not look at all

But lay down together.

And there have been two strangers

Who met one April day

And looked long at each other,

And went their way.

We are still outward-bound to obligations

And, radiant centers, life must drink us up,

Devour our strength in multiple relations.