by May Sarton
They breathe through the blood.
They are there in the stem
(Plant or human flesh).
Does the seed too resist?
But something cracks the shell,
Breaks down the pod,
Explodes
That dark enclosed life,
Safe, self-contained,
Pushes the frail root out,
The fresh dangerous leaf.
Voices do not speak
From a cloud,
But we are inhabited.
5
Now at last
The dialogue begins again.
I lay my cheek on the hard earth
And listen, listen.
No, it is not the endless conversations
Of the grasses and their shallow roots;
No, it is not the beetles,
The good worms, I hear,
But tremor much deeper down.
Answer?
But the answer is happening,
Flows through every crevice
And across the stillest air.
Under the ledges
Artesian water
Flows fast
Even in time of drought.
Invocation
Come out of the dark earth
Here where the minerals
Glow in their stone cells
Deeper than seed or birth.
Come under the strong wave
Here where the tug goes
As the tide turns and flows
Below that architrave.
Come into the pure air
Above all heaviness
Of storm and cloud to this
Light-possessed atmosphere.
Come into, out of, under
The earth, the wave, the air.
Love, touch us everywhere
With primeval candor.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the editors of the following journals, where some of these poems made their first appearance: Ante, Contempora, Friends Journal, The Green River Review, The Ladies’ Home Journal, The Lyric, The Massachusetts Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Saturday Review, The Small Pond, Twigs, United Church Herald, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Voices, Yankee.
A Biography of May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.
Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.
At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).
On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.
In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.
For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.
While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.
In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book, Punch’s Secret, followed by A Walk Through the Woods in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.
In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1971 by May Sarton
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-7451-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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