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Now I become myself by May Sarton  

senfully 55F  
540 posts
2/24/2021 4:15 am
Now I become myself by May Sarton


This is not a poem I wrote. It is one I found early in my life and had read for me at my wedding in 1992? Something like that. Terrible with numbers. I forget about this poem, and then find it again about every 10 years or so. I guess that's an advantage of a memory like mine lol. There's good things to discover again and again.

This poem is everything to me, every time I rediscover it and read it. I found it before I had started writing<b> poems. </font></b>It means even more to me today as I'm writing. I hope the ending of the poem can feel like mine someday.

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!

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