May Sarton

By Moonlight
We are true lovers without hope

Whose hearts are locked to time,

So lie with me on the grassy sward

On the cool black-shadowed slope,

For we’ll not sleep in a close warm room:

Whatever we are moving toward

An ample bed’s not our reward

Who are mad with the moon.

Wherever passionate love is leading

We’ll be discovering alone,

So little hope it can endure,

So wild, so deep, so dark the needing

That even fastened bone to bone,

We’ll not have lasting peace, that’s sure,

Nor any haven from despair

Who love by light of moon.

So come, though we shall never rest

In any house to call our own,

By any hearth we light and tend,

Lie here upon the cold earth’s breast

And lean your length hard on the stone:

Hearts break and they may also mend

But here until the certain end,

Wed me by light of moon.

Now the great open sky is ours

And the long light across the loam,

And we, gigantic hearts of dust,

Lie open like night-blooming flowers.

The homeless moon is our bright home,

And we shine too because we must,

Oh magic that we cannot trust,

The lovely changing moon!

Moving In
I moved into my house one day

In a downpour of leaves and rain,

“I took possession,” as they say,

With solitude for my domain.

At first it was an empty place

Where every room I came to meet

Watched me in silence like a face:

I heard the whisper of my feet.

So huge the absence walking there

Beside me on the yellow floor,

That one fly buzzing on the air

But made the stillness more and more.

What I possessed was all my own,

Yet not to be possessed at all,

And not a house or even hearthstone,

And never any sheltering wall.

There solitude became my task,

No shelter but a grave demand,

And I must answer, never ask,

Taking this bridegroom by the hand.

I moved into my life one day

In a downpour of leaves in flood,

I took possession, as they say,

And knew I was alone for good.

Moth in the Schoolroom

Over night it had emerged

From the contorted bisque shell

Of its cocoon

In a small cage

In the schoolroom.

We watched it,

Fragile furred antennae,

Wings still damp and wrinkled

Feeling their way

Toward this new incarnation,

And their slow, slow

Pulsation.

I stood there beside you

After another meeting,

Close to another parting,

And thought of our mothlike love—

The cocoons of separation,

The cramped hard times,

And wings pulsing slowly

After we come together.

How long has love to live

So close to hope,

So close to caged?

Now it is death again

In the cocoon

That limits and contorts.

The exquisite moth

Its velvet softness,

Is a slow worm

Waiting and suffering

Toward huge quiet wings.

We are still outward-bound to obligations

And, radiant centers, life must drink us up,

Devour our strength in multiple relations.

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.

This is the time when voyagers return

With a mad longing for known customs and things

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,

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.

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,

It’s life we harvest here

(Sun on the crimson vine).