Sherry Chandler

May Sarton, from The House by the Sea (Norton, 1977):

Tuesday, March 16, 1976:

The storm has come, with wild white veils, high wind. I can’t see the ocean . . . really it is thrilling to be so isolated in such a fierce white wilderness of a world. …sometimes these days there are marvelous things on PBS. Last night I saw Archie MacLeish talking with Moyers for an hour. Archie is eighty-three, his face as smooth as a smooth stone. What a wonderful way to grow old, not to wrinkle, but just the opposite, to seem washed clear, down to an essence. I was moved when he reacted strongly to a question about poets and politics, reminding Bill Moyers that Yeats had only become a great poet after 1916 when he became passionately involved. I have always been attacked for writing political poems, first by Conrad Aiken years ago, then of course by Louise Bogan (some of this argument is in our letters). Bad rhetorical poetry is just as bad as any bad poetry and I think the question is how deeply moved one has been, whether the political poem can come from the subconscious or reach the subconscious to be fertilized. At Notre Dame I was asked to read the Kali poem—I have not done that often— and I think it did work. But why worry? One does what one can, and one does what one must. At the moment the inspiration for any poem at all would be a present from the gods.

Excerpts from May Sarton’s “The Invocation to Kali” can be found at the link. Here is just a tiny bit:

The kingdom of Kali is within us deep.
The built-in destroyer, the savage goddess,
Wakes in the dark and takes away our sleep.
She moves through the blood to poison gentleness.

She keeps us from being what we long to be;
Tenderness withers under her iron laws.
We may hold her like a lunatic, but it is she
Held down, who bloodies with her claws.

How then to set her free or come to terms
With the volcano itself, the fierce power
Erupting injuries, shrieking alarms?
Kali among her skulls must have her hour.

It is time for the invocation, to atone
For what we fear most and have not dared to face:
Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;
We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place.

Every creation is born out of the dark.
Every birth is bloody. Something gets torn.
Kali is there to do her sovereign work
Or else the living child will be stillborn.

So, today we turn the calendar page and autumn is really, truly here. Golden October may not be so much golden as brown around here. Driving up to my mother’s place in Owen County yesterday, I was dismayed at the number of trees whose leaves were not the brown of autumn but the dried up brown of death.

September was a quite a month in my life, beginning with my mother’s 90th birthday and ending with the 28th Women Writers Conference, the viewing of Motherland Afghanistan and unforgettable readings by poets such as Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye. If you ever get a chance to hear either of these women, grab it!

But now it’s Monday morning, another week to face, another calendar page to turn. I have much to process and dirty dishes in the sink. The quotidian world must have its due, but there’s something to be said for washing dishes. I’ve written some of my best lines with my hands in warm soapy water.

I will have more to say later. Meanwhile, take a look at Jen Stark’s cardstock sculpture. Link courtesy of Donna Rhae Marder.