|
Greetings,
Late in this merry month of May, let us turn to the poetry of May Sarton to make the Daffodils and Roses bloom. Stop for a moment, and enjoy May Sarton's last reading, just posted on the Wild West Women youtube channel.
When I read that an unenlightened someone in Florida saw “Hate” in Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem,” The Hill we Climb,” and petitioned to have the poem banned, I flashed back to the truths that poetry can often reveal. The subject of my first film, May Sarton , showed me this point. I dug out my film of May Sarton’s last big public reading, in Los Angeles, in 1987, a few years before she died.
In this live reading Sarton’s honest and tender poem about the AIDS epidemic and its victims. She shares her experience with the hundreds of gay men who leaned on Sarton for support and strength, how the mortal disease brought Grace and Mercy.
Sarton was condemned by some for her stand and tenderness. And her treatment of AIDS as a “learning a new way to mother—Love, Love, Love.” Like Gorman, Sarton was “gutted” and criticized. Sarton had earlier been fired from her teaching position at a New England College for being a Lesbian; but she never stopped her openhearted and honest creations.
The first poem in the reading, “Absence” is simple but brings a bright awareness: a giant, beloved pine giant tree had fallen in her yard.
“Must we lose what we love/ To know how much we loved it?
It is always there now/that absence, that awful absence.”
Here’s to the poets who share simple graces and great truths in the presence of the present.
It has been humbling learning, knowing and filming the Poet May Sarton. I must have driven her mad from time to time, as she expected more of me, than I trusted in myself to possess. And in the end, her trust of me, her expectation of me and the art of film made me more creative and dedicated to the work of representing my Muse. I was profoundly touched and relieved when, after seeing the first showing of my and her film, World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton: “Now I can Die.”
Thank you , May Sarton, and all poets who enlarge and sensitize us.
Martha
| 
