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- 03/24/2023
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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.
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