Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/26/2018 - 10/31/2018
All Day

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And finally,  a poem by a prolific UU writer . . .

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!

May Sarton (1912 – 1995), author of over fifty books, was a poet, novelist, and essayist known best for her published journals, which recount her life from her mid-adulthood until just months before her death. Born in Belgium, she made her home in New Hampshire in a house with a view of the ocean. She was a Unitarian Universalist, a lesbian, a feminist, a lover of cats, and a writer who prized her friendships deeply. “Examined as a whole,” one critic wrote, “the body of May Sarton’s writing is almost overwhelming. It reveals an artist who has not remained stagnant or afraid of change. ‘Truth,’ especially the truth within herself, has been her life-long quest.”