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    AC Benus
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 91. Three Poems from March

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Three Poems from March

for Margaret Conklin

 

 

The Belovèd

 

It is enough of honor for one lifetime

To have known you better than the rest have known,

The shadows and the colors of your voice,

Your will, immutable and still as stone.

 

The shy heart, so lonely and so gay,

The sad laughter and the pride of pride,

The tenderness, the depth of tenderness

Rich as the earth, and wide as heaven is wide.

 

 

“When I am not with you”

 

When I am not with you

I am alone,

For there is no one else

And there is nothing

That comforts me but you.

When you are gone

Suddenly I am sick,

Blackness is round me,

There is nothing left.

I have tried many things,

Music and cities.

Stars in their constellations

And the sea,

But there is nothing

That comforts me but you;

And my poor pride bows down

Like grass in a rain-storm

Drenched with my longing.

The night is unbearable,

Oh let me go to you

For there is no one,

There is nothing

To comfort me but you.

 

 

On a March Day

 

Here in the teeth of this triumphant wind

That shakes the naked shadows on the ground,

Making a key-board of the earth to strike

From clattering tree and hedge a separate sound,

 

Bears witness for me that I loved my life,

All things that hurt me and things that healed,

And that I swore to it this day in March,

Here at the edge of this new-broken field.

 

Only you knew me, tell them I was glad

For every hour since my hour of birth,

And that ceased to fear, as once I feared,

The last complete reunion with the earth.

—Sara Teasdale, [i]

1926

 

 

 

 

 


[i] “Three Poems from March” Sara Teasdale Dark of the Moon (New York 1926), ps. 191-192

Teasdale’s “reputation” (as a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less) is shielded from any associations with the living LGBTI2S+ Community by the hegemony that routinely scours sites like Wikipedia of any Gay “taint.” However, the poet’s orientation is neither a matter for denial, nor debate, and one need only refer to her entry in Keith Stern’s Queers in History (Dallas 2009), p. 447, for clarity.

_

as noted
  • Love 2
Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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Thanks for sharing these beautiful tributes to love.  Since the background always helps, I went off in search of my own this time.  Avoiding the traditionally-whitewashed sources, I found some reasonably frank biographical accounts.  Sara Teasdale was clearly a very complex person who was a victim of the era in which she lived.  A familiar tale that rarely ends well.

Edited by Backwoods Boy
  • Love 3
1 hour ago, Backwoods Boy said:

Thanks for sharing these beautiful tributes to love.  Since the background always helps, I went off in search of my own this time.  Avoiding the traditionally-whitewashed sources, I found some reasonably frank biographical accounts.  Sara Teasdale was clearly a very complex person who was a victim of the era in which she lived.  A familiar tale that rarely ends well.

Thank you, Jon. I'm really pleased I inspired you to dig a little deeper, and avoid the must-be-so-because-we-say-so trap of Wiki :) You've brought a smile to my day with this information. 

And more of the STL "something in the water" that births great writers belongs to Teasdale (as it does to yours truly ;) ) It's amazing how many of the world's best are buried in glorious old Bellefontaine Cemetery

 

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6 minutes ago, Parker Owens said:

These are beautiful poems. They speak to a deep, transcendent love, one that cries out for faithful understanding. With that in mind, I’m grateful for the added information you added in your notes. 

Thank you, Parker, for reading and commenting on these. It seems there is a sort of unique hope that belongs to the month of March. It reaches for the break of cold weather, but is held back . . . but still, it grasps for spring.

Thanks again!

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On 3/25/2023 at 3:27 AM, raven1 said:

Thanks for bringing these lovely poems to us, AC.  I also appreciate the thoughts and information shared by all. 

Thanks, Terry. I was having it dawn on me, right this instant, how ironic it is the Pulitzer Prize committee (accidentally) awarded a Gay person like Teasdale the first of their Prizes for American poetry. In The Love of Friends: An anthology of Gay and Lesbian letters to lovers and friends [Jones / Clark, Editors] (New York 1997) another American Lesbian poet (arguably a much finer one . . . ) Edna Saint-Vincent Millay writes in the 1920s how she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt the Committee is shunning her work entirely because she's Gay, and for no other reason (ps. 335-342). Her feelings seem borne out by the fact that Hart Crane was also denied this top recognition during his life; denied it solely due to the rabid, anti-gay discrimination we still are forced to live through today.         

Edited by AC Benus
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