Just Because

Because there are 528 things currently not getting done in my house and life - the basement renovation that was supposed to end last week, the 10 hours I spent painting the basement this weekend, the carpet that is not getting installed tomorrow but instead on Thursday when I can't actually be home - and the Christmas cards, the wrapping, the baking, the tidying up of this infernal mess that is my home.... I give you a poem by May Sarton:

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 and 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 so 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.