Halfway to Silence Read Online Free

and reap their harvests from
    This flesh ever to be renewed and reconceived
    As the bright ploughs break open the dark loam.
    Whatever the cost and whatever I believed,
    Only the earth itself, great honeycomb,
    Gives comfort to the many times bereaved.
    Whatever cloud comes over with black rain
    To make my life seem of so little worth,
    To cover the bright gold with guilt and pain,
    The poem, life itself, labor of birth
    Has been forced back again and again
    To find renewal in the fertile earth.
    Fidelity to what? To a gnarled tree, a root,
    To the necessity for growth and discipline.
    Now I am old why mourn what had to go?
    Despite the loss and so much fallen fruit,
    The harvest is so rich it fills my bin.
    What had to grow has been allowed to grow.

A Winter Notebook
    1
Low tide—
The sea’s slow motion,
The surge and slur
Over rocky shingle.
A few gulls ride
Rocking-horse waves.
Under blurred gray sky
The field shines white.

2
I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.
Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.
So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.
So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.

3
I wake in a wide room
Before dawn,
Just a little light framed by three windows.
I wake in a large space
Listening to the gentle hush of waves.
I watch the sea open like a flower
A huge blue flower
As the sun rises
Out of the dark.

4
It is dark when I go downstairs
And always the same shiver
As I turn on the light—
There they are, alive in the cold,
Hyacinths, begonias,
Cyclamen, a cloud of bloom
As though they were birds
Settled for a moment in the big window.
I wake my hand, still half asleep,
With a sweet geranium leaf.
After breakfast
I tend to all their needs,
These extravagant joys,
Become a little drunk on green
And the smell of earth.
We have lived through another
Bitter cold night.

5
On this dark cold morning
After the ice storm
A male pheasant
Steps precisely across the snow.
His red and gold,
The warmth and shine of him
In the white freeze,
Explosive!
A firecracker pheasant
Opens the new year.

6
I sit at my desk under attack,
Trying to survive
Panic and guilt, the flu…
Outside
Even sunlight looks cold
Glancing off glare ice.
Inside,
Narcissus in bloom,
And a patch of sun on the pile
Of unanswered letters.
I lift my eyes
To the blue
Open-ended ocean.
Why worry?
Some things are always there.

7
The ornamental cherry
Is alive
With cedar waxwings,
Their dandy crests silhouetted
Against gray sky.
They are after cherries,
Dark-red jewels
In frozen clusters
On the asymmetrical twigs.
In the waste of dirty snow
The scene is as brilliant
As a Rajput painting.
I note the yellow-banded tail feathers,
A vermilion accent on the wing—
What elegance!

8
The dark islands
Float on a silvery sea.
I see them like a mirage
Through the branches of the great oak.
After the leaves come out
They will be gone—
These winter joys
And snow coming tonight.

Of the Muse
There is no poetry in lies,
But in crude honesty
There is hope for poetry.
For a long time now
I have been deprived of it
Because of pride,
Would not allow myself
The impossible.
Today, I have learned
That to become
A great, cracked,
Wide-open door
Into nowhere
Is wisdom.
When I was young,
I misunderstood
The Muse.
Now I am older and wiser,
I can be glad of her
As one is glad of the light.
We do not thank the light,
But rejoice in what we see
Because of it.
What I see today
Is the snow falling:
All things are made new.

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