by May Sarton
The Viking Press, Inc. 1962, p. 5.
1
There are times when
I think only of killing
The voracious animal
Who is my perpetual shame,
The violent one
Whose raging demands
Break down peace and shelter
Like a peacock’s scream.
There are times when
I think only of how to do away
With this brute power
That cannot be tamed.
I am the cage where poetry
Paces and roars. The beast
Is the god. How murder the god?
How live with the terrible god?
2
The Kingdom of Kali
Anguish is always there, lurking at night,
Wakes us like a scourge, the creeping sweat
As rage is remembered, self-inflicted blight.
What is it in us we have not mastered yet?
What Hell have we made of the subtle weaving
Of nerve with brain, that all centers tear?
We live in a dark complex of rage and grieving.
The machine grates, grates, whatever we are.
The kingdom of Kali is within us deep.
The built-in destroyer, the savage goddess,
Wakes in the dark and takes away our sleep.
She moves through the blood to poison gentleness.
She keeps us from being what we long to be;
Tenderness withers under her iron laws.
We may hold her like a lunatic, but it is she
Held down, who bloodies with her claws.
How then to set her free or come to terms
With the volcano itself, the fierce power
Erupting injuries, shrieking alarms?
Kali among her skulls must have her hour.
It is time for the invocation, to atone
For what we fear most and have not dared to face:
Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;
We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place.
Every creation is born out of the dark.
Every birth is bloody. Something gets torn.
Kali is there to do her sovereign work
Or else the living child will be still-born.
She cannot be cast out (she is here for good)
Nor battled to the end. Who wins that war?
She cannot be forgotten, jailed, or killed.
Heaven must still be balanced against her.
Out of destruction she comes to wrest
The juice from the cactus, its harsh spine,
And until she, the destroyer, has been blest,
There will be no child, no flower, and no wine.
3
The Concentration Camps
Have we managed to fade them out like God?
Simply eclipse the unpurged images?
Eclipse the children with a mountain of shoes?
Let the bones fester like animal bones,
False teeth, bits of hair, spilled liquid eyes,
Disgusting, not to be looked at, like a blight?
Ages ago we closed our hearts to blight.
Who believes now? Who cries, “merciful God”?
We gassed God in the ovens, great piteous eyes,
Burned God in a trash-heap of images,
Refused to make a compact with dead bones,
And threw away the children with their shoes—
Millions of sandals, sneakers, small worn shoes—
Thrust them aside as a disgusting blight.
Not ours, this death, to take into our bones,
Not ours a dying mutilated God.
We freed our minds from gruesome images,
Pretended we had closed their open eyes
That never could be closed, dark puzzled eyes,
The ghosts of children who went without shoes
Naked toward the ovens’ bestial images,
Strangling for breath, clawing the blight,
Piled up like pigs beyond the help of God…
With food in our stomachs, flesh on our bones,
We turned away from the stench of bones,
Slept with the living, drank in sexy eyes,
Hurried for shelter from a murdered God.
New factories turned out millions of shoes.
We hardly noticed the faint smell of blight,
Stuffed with new cars, ice cream, rich images.
But no grass grew on the raw images.
Corruption mushroomed from decaying bones.
Joy disappeared. The creature of the blight
Rose in the cities, dark smothered eyes.
Our children danced with rage in their shoes,
Grew up to question who had murdered God,
While we evaded their too attentive eyes,
Walked the pavane of death in our new shoes,
Sweated with anguish and remembered God.
4
The Time of Burning
For a long time we shall have only to listen,
Not argue or defend, but listen to each other.
Let curses fall without intercession,
Let those fires burn we have tried to smother.
What we have pushed aside and tried to bury
Lives with a staggering thrust we cannot parry.
We have to reckon with Kali for better or worse,
The angry tongue that lashes us with flame
As long-held hope turns bitter and men curse,
“Burn, baby, burn” in the goddess’ name.
We are asked to bear it, to take in the whole,
The long indifferent beating down of soul.
It is the time of burning, hate exposed.
We shall have to live with only Kali near.
She comes in her fury, early or late, disposed
To tantrums we have earned and must endure.
We have to listen to the harsh undertow
To reach the place where Kali can bestow.
But she must have her dreadful empire first
Until the prisons of the mind are broken free
And every suffering center at its worst
Can be appealed to her dark mystery.
She comes to purge the altars in her way,
And at her altar we shall have to pray.
It is a place of skulls, a deathly place
Where we confront our violence and feel,
Before that broken and self-ravaged face,
The murderers we are, brought here to kneel.
5
It is time for the invocation:
Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us to bring darkness into the light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is—
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.
Put the wild hunger where it belongs,
Within the act of creation,
Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love.
Help us to be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali,
Awesome power.
After the Tiger
We have been struck by a lightning force
And roaring like beasts we have been caught
Exulting, bloody, glad to destroy and curse.
The tiger, violence, takes the human throat,
Glad of the blood, glad of the lust
In this jungle of action without will,
Where we can tear down what we hate at last.
That tiger strength—oh it is beautiful!
There is no effort. It is all success.
It fee
ls like a glorious creation.
An absolute, it knows no more or less,
Cannot be worked at, is nothing but sensation.
That is its awful power, so like release
The animal within us roars its joy.
What other god could give us this wild peace
As we run out, tumultuous to destroy?
But when the tiger goes, we are alone,
Sleeping the madness off until some dawn
When human eyes wake, huge and forlorn,
To meet the human face that has been torn.
Who was a tiger once is weak and small,
And terribly unfit for all he has to do.
Lifting a single stone up from the rubble
Takes all his strength. And he hurts too.
Who is a friend here, who an enemy?
Each face he meets is the same savaged face
Recovering itself and marked by mystery.
There is no power left in this sad place—
Only the light of dawn and its cold shadow.
How place a cool hand on some burning head?
Even compassion is still dazed and raw.
The simplest gesture grates a way toward need.
After the violence peace does not rise
Like a forgiving sun to wash all clean,
Nor does it rush out like some fresh surmise
Without a thought for what the wars have been.
“I too am torn” or “Where is your hurt?”
The answer may be only silences.
The ghostly tiger lives on in the heart.
Wounds sometimes do not heal for centuries.
So the peace-maker must dig wells and build
Small shelters stone by stone, often afraid;
Must live with a long patience not to yield.
Only destruction wields a lightning blade.
After the tiger we become frail and human,
The dust of ruins acrid in the throat.
Oh brothers, take it as an absolution
That we must work so slowly toward hope!
“We’ll To The Woods No More,
The Laurels Are Cut Down”
(At Kent State)
The war games are over,
The laurels all cut down.
We’ll to the woods no more
With live ammunition
To murder our own children
Because they hated war.
The war games are over.
How many times in pain
We were given a choice—
“Sick of the violence”
(Oh passionate human voice!)—
But buried it again.
The war games are over.
Virile, each stood alone—
John, Robert, Martin Luther.
Still we invoke the gun,
Still make a choice for murder,
Bury the dead again.
The war games are over,
And all the laurel’s gone.
Dead warrior, dead lover,
Was the war lost or won?
What say you, blasted head?
No answer from the dead.
Night Watch
1
Sweet night nursing a neighbor—
The old lady lifts her hands
And writes a message
On the air—
Gently I lay them down.
Sudden motion
Might shift the bandage
Over one eye.
Across the hall
A woman moans twice.
I alone am not in pain,
Wide-awake under a circle of light.
Two days ago in Kentucky
I was the sick child,
Sick for this patchy, barren earth,
For tart talk,
Dissatisfaction,
Sharp bitter laughter,
Sick for a granite pillow.
Among that grass soft as silk,
Those courtesies, those evasions,
I was sick as a trout
In a stagnant pond.
Wide-awake,
I weigh one thing against another.
The old lady will see
Better than before;
The woman who moaned
Sleeps herself whole again.
Sweet, innocent night
In the hospital
Where wounds can be healed!
2
The birds sing
Before dawn,
And before dawn
I begin to see a little.
I hold the old warm hand in mine
To keep it from clawing
The bandage,
And to comfort me.
I am happy as a mother
Whose good baby sleeps.
In Kentucky
They are spurned mothers,
Curse the children
And their hot black eyes,
Hard from not weeping;
Remember the old days,
Dear pickaninnies,
Mouths pink as watermelon.
What happens
When the baby screams,
Batters the barred cage of its bed,
Wears patience thin?
What happens
When the baby is six feet tall,
Throws stones,
Breaks windows?
What happens
When the grown man
Beats out against us
His own hard core,
Wants to hurt?
In the white night
At the hospital
I listened hard.
I weighed one thing
Against another.
I heard, “Love, love.”
(Love them to death?)
And at dawn I heard a voice,
“If you love them,
Let them grow.”
3
The convalescent
Is quick to weak rage
Or tears;
In a state of growth
We are in pain,
Violent, hard to live with.
Our wounds ache.
We curse rather than bless.
4
“I hate them,” she said.
“They spoil everything,” said
The woman from Baltimore.
“It is not the dear old town
I used to know.”
I felt pain like an assault,
The old pain again
When the world thrusts itself inside,
When we have to take in the outside,
When we have to decide
To be crazy-human with hope
Or just plain crazy
With fear.
(The drunken Black in the subway
Will rape you, white woman,
Because you had bad dreams.)
Stomach pain, or vomit it.
In Kentucky I threw up
One whole night.
Get rid of this great sick baby
We carry around
Or go through the birth-sweat again.
Lazy heart,
Slow self-indulgent beat,
Take the sick world in.
5
In Baltimore
The Black who drove me to the airport
Seemed an enormous, touchable
Blessing.
“When you give a speech,” he told me,
“And you get that scared feeling,
Take a deep breath. It helps.”
Comfort flowed out from him.
He talked about pain
In terms of healing.
Of Baltimore, that great hospital
Where the wounds fester
Among azaleas and dogwood,
The lovely quiet gardens,
“We are making things happen,”
Said the black man.
“It is going to be beautiful.”
He had no doubt.
Wide awake in the hospital
In th
e morning light,
I weighed one thing against the other.
I took a deep breath.
Part Two
Proteus
They were intense people, given to migraine,
Outbursts of arrogance, self-pity, or wild joy,
Affected by the weather like a weathervane,
Hungry for glory, exhausted by each day,
Humble at night and filled with self-distrust.
Time burned their heels. They ran because they must—
Sparkled, spilled over in the stress of living.
Oh, they were fickle, fluid, sometimes cruel,
Who still imagined they were always giving;
And the mind burned experience like fuel,
So they were sovereign losers, clumsy winners,
And read the saints, and knew themselves as sinners.
Wild blood subdued, it was pure form they blest.
Their sunlit landscapes were painted across pain.
They dreamed of peaceful gardens and of rest—
And now their joys, their joys alone remain.
Transparent, smiling, like calm gods to us,
Their names are Mozart, Rilke—Proteus.
A Last Word
(for my students at Wellesley College)
Whatever we found in that room was not easy,
But harder and harder, and for me as well,
Fumbling for words when what we fumbled for
Could not be spoken, the crude source itself;
The clever people had no news to tell.
The best failed. That is the way it is.
The best knew what we were mining after
Was not to be reached or counted in an hour.
The worst poems, maybe, became fertile,
And we knew moments of pure crazy laughter.
Often you came into that room becalmed,
Your faces buttoned against the afternoon.
If the hour occasionally opened into trees,
If we digressed, leaving the subject flat,
Well, we were fighting hard against the gloom.
The vivid battle brought us within the hour
Out of the doldrums together, edged and warm.
At any instant the fall of a mask
Released some naked wisdom; an open face
Surprised itself and took our world by storm.
For you, I trust, the time was never wasted;
For me, driven to dig deep under my cover,
Into the unsafe places where poets operate,