I haven’t done Poetry Friday in a long time but I have been rereading this poem a lot of late. I printed it out to keep near me in my office to remind me of my most important goal for the coming year, to be here, be now. I need to become closer to the me that others see and realize that person is a person of value. I want to be comfortable in my skin, whatever shape it may be at the moment.

Now I Become Myself

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

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/52015-May-Sarton-Now-I-Become-Myself

The round-up for Poetry Friday can be found at A Year of Reading,
http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2009/01/poetry-friday-roundup-is-here.html