Sarah Simon - Part 5

Oh, if you could have seen her! You would know
How Sarah triumphed in those full, firm years
Of latter youth and glorious womanhood —
How beautiful she was, and how she walked
With burdens on her head, firm from the waist,
Like maidens that look out from Athens' porch,
Princess of caryatids — how her brood,
Nimble and laughing, romped along the lane
Before her and behind her with wide eyes,
And lips apart to taste the honeyed breeze
Of its most delicate tang of happiness —
How smooth they were from water and the sun,
Like olive wood set in a southern door
With color that might melt a sculptor's eye —
Let it not fidget yours when bent on fawns.
For such they were, with forest attitudes.
But dressed in glowing stuffs she loved to sew,
From bolts stored in her chests from strange countries,
So heathen-striped they made the white folk stare.
Lucky for Sarah that these things in chests
Were kept in chests and not inside her heart
To gloat upon until they faded there.
Lucky for her, thrice lucky that she found
Her heart was filled with life about her house,
Her flowers, voices of the sea and wind,
And longed for no small gossip. Set apart
Like some strong tree within a cloistered place,
A part of it, yet heedless of all men
That through reverberant arches come and go,
She let their passing voices die away,
While she grew stronger, planted, and alone,
Sending her roots down deep into the ground,
And flowering when her glorious season came.

For she was one with nature in her place,
Part of the winds that blew across warm seas,
Of rainbow mists, blue water, and white air,
Sunshine like angels' shadows on the world,
Vine leaves, and bodies of soft living things,
And of the sandy and the colored earth,
Red clay that gestates lilies, and dark loam.
The very essence of it in a mold
Of mild perfection, with a crystal mind
Clear as the air it looked through from her eyes.
All that Atlantean islands might have bred
If curse of cross and candle, sword and horse
And greedy admirals, and thirsty crews,
And half the needy lees of Christendom
With chains, and creeds, and theories, and machines
Had never saved such worlds for gods and kings
To work their avid, sovereign wills upon.
It seemed as if too late fond nature now
Had fashioned Sarah to rebuke these things.

Yet hers was not a tale of paradise
Under the rustling palms, of childlike mind
Too innocent for suffering, lacking pain.
Sarah was deeply read, though not in books.
Deeper than any print her mind probed down
Into the shades of meaning in the rocks
Where fishes hide, and up into the heights
Where early blossoms turn to later fruit
And eggs to winged singers. And she saw
The sky reflected by the pensive sea,
Whence rolled the clouds in slowly shifted shapes,
Endlessly different in a void the same,
As if some huge and pondering memory dreamed
Within the brain of space on all things past —
Remembered — and then sped its thoughts again,
The wind its will, which tore the dreams apart
And then experimented with new forms
Dimly foreboded by the clouds above;
Unconsciously reflected by the sea;
Brought forth on earth in full reality.

And Sarah looked upon the face of plants
And saw the buds unclose long-fringed eyes
To look with complex secrets at the sky.
And through the amber light of honeycombs
She watched the darkly moving, intent bee
Filling octagonal chambers, while the hives
With million myriad-murmured ecstasy,
Moved with the summer rhythm of their lives.
She found both seeds and eggs contained a plan
With which she must agree if she would reap
Increase and benefit for her own needs.
Thus saw things as they were, not as she wished
That they might be to suit some other scheme
That might do well enough on Mercury
Where wishes father facts upon desire.
No spectacles of words informed her brain,
Nothing but pictures of reality,
And feelings strong that bathed her pictured thoughts
With rays invisible and visible
Of warmth and radiance, yet pricked out the heights,
So was the inmost chamber of her self
As bright, and glowing as her days without
When the hot, glittering sun from tropic seas
Strikes ultra-violet; scarlet from high peaks
Important because something made them so.
Such was the constant weather of her soul,
Where words first sprang to blossom into acts
That ripened into fruit of ways and things.