A Grain of Mustard Seed (6 page)

The dead trees woke; each bush held its bird.

I prayed for delicate love and difficult,

That all be gentle now and know no fault,

That all be patient—as a wild rabbit fled

Sudden before me. Dear love, I would have said

(And to each bird who flew up from the wood),

I would be gentler still if that I could,

For on this Easter morning it would seem

The softest footfall danger is, extreme…

And so I prayed to be less than the grass

And yet to feel the Presence that might pass.

I made a prayer. I heard the answer, “Wait,

When all is so in peril, and so delicate!”

The Godhead As Lynx

Kyrie Eleison, O wild lynx!

Mysterious sad eyes, and yet so bright,

Wherein mind never grieves or thinks,

But absolute attention is alight—

Before that golden gaze, so deep and cold,

My human rage dissolves, my pride is broken.

I am a child here in a world grown old.

Eons ago its final word was spoken.

Eyes of the god, hard as obsidian,

Look into mine. Kyrie Eleison.

Terrible as it is, your gaze consoles,

And awe turns tender before your guiltless head.

(What we have lost to enter into souls!)

I feel a longing for the lynx’s bed,

To submerge self in that essential fur,

And sleep close to this ancient world of grace,

As if there could be healing next to her,

The mother-lynx in her pre-human place.

Yet that pure beauty does not know compassion—

O cruel god, Kyrie Eleison!

It is the marvelous world, free of our love,

Free of our hate, before our own creation,

Animal world, so still and so alive.

We never can go back to pure sensation,

Be self-possessed as the great lynx, or calm.

Yet she is lightning to cut down the lamb,

A beauty that devours without a qualm,

A cruel god who only says, “I am,”

Never, “You must become,” as you, our own

God say forever. Kyrie Eleison!

How rarely You look out from human eyes,

Yet it is we who bear creation on,

Troubled, afflicted, and so rarely wise,

Feeling nostalgia for an old world gone.

Imperfect as we are, and never whole,

Still You live in us like a fertile seed,

Always becoming, and asking of the soul

To stretch beyond sweet nature, answer need,

And lay aside the beauty of the lynx

To be this laboring self who groans and thinks.

The Waves

Even in the middle of the silent firs,

The secret world of mushroom and of moss,

Where all is delicate and nothing stirs,

We get the rumor of those distant wars

And the harsh sound of loss.

This is an island open to the churning,

The boom, the constant cannonade,

The turning back of tides and their returning,

And ocean broken like some restless mourning

That cannot find a bed.

Oh love, let us be true then to this will—

Not to each other, human and defeated,

But to great power, our Heaven and our Hell,

That thunders out its triumph unabated,

And is never still.

For we are married to this rocky coast,

To the charge of huge waves upon it,

The ceaseless war, the tide gained and then lost,

And ledges worn down smooth but not downcast—

Wild rose and granite.

Here in the darkness of the stillest wood,

Absence, the ocean, tires us with its roar;

We bear love’s thundering rumor in the blood

Beyond our understanding, ill or good—

Listen, once more!

Beyond the Question

1

The phoebe sits on her nest

Hour after hour,

Day after day,

Waiting for life to burst out

From under her warmth.

Can I weave a nest for silence,

Weave it of listening,

Listening,

Layer upon layer?

But one must first become small,

Nothing but a presence,

Attentive as a nesting bird,

Proffering no slightest wish,

No tendril of a wish

Toward anything that might happen

Or be given,

Only the warm, faithful waiting,

Contained in one’s smallness.

Beyond the question, the silence.

Before the answer, the silence.

2

When all is in
ORDER
,

Flowers on each mantel,

Floors swept,

Newspapers laid aside,

Wars, deaths suspended…

Silence flows in

And it happens—

A patch of sunlight

On the wall, a message;

The great white peony,

An illumination.

Each thing is haloed.

I live in a Book of Hours.

3

Before my eyes the peony,

An arrested whirlpool,

Soft as the breast of a swan,

Floats on the air…

Before my eyes,

The petals fall apart,

Plop down

In shapeless confusion,

The pure form spent.

Creation itself

Tears the fabric apart,

In the instant of achievement

Makes new demands.

Must I rejoice

In the harsh, fertile

Answer to loss,

The stiff, five-pointed seed?

Not keep it

A moment longer,

Magic floating on air,

The flower,

The fulfillment?

No, creation says,

Not a moment longer.

4

Voices do not speak

From a cloud.

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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New York, NY 10014

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