Now I become Myself, by May Sarton

This is an amazing piece by May Sarton which appealed to my sense of rebirth at this time in my life, a rebirth where you finally become yourself, a little like TS Eliots returning to the place from which you first started and knowing it.
—UnderThisSeparatorIsLatterHalf—
Now I become Myself
by May Sarton

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Related posts:

Related posts:

1. Mary Oliver – Dogfish
2. The Eve of Destruction
3. A Brave and Startling Truth by Maya Angelou
4. Serving The World – From a lecture by Alice Bailey
5. The best novels of the 20th Century

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