”What shall I give you, my lord, my lover?
The gift that breaks the heart in me:
I bid you awake at dawn and discover
I have gone my way and left you free.”
Sara Teasdale - 1884-1933. *The Gift
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Oh Sara, freedom comes not by departure,
when you parted away with so many whole bits of me,
this “gift” more marked by what you’ve left,
freedom redefined by achey absence, holes & gaps,
the long division remainders that are missing,
the homeless jigsaw pieces of final solution
one hundred years I’ve worshipped at your altar
of writ words carved in my oaken skin,
this a freedom true & stolid,
your blond letters etched, poems silken, each an earring,
a cascading dangling chandelier pairing in my internals,
alas, you loved me last not as a lord~lover, but as
savior~soldier
what conjuring wooled your eyes, woven disguise fooling
anyone, the dawn breaks, gone is my way by your away,
you are the gift that created my heart, you are the are,
this then return what you are taken even in love wrapped,
return to me for you are the gift that I cannot without live
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Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a wealthy family. As a young woman she traveled to Chicago and grew acquainted with Harriet Monroe and the literary circle around Poetry. Teasdale wrote seven books of poetry in her lifetime and received public admiration for her well-crafted lyrical poetry which centered on a woman’s changing perspectives on beauty, love, and death. Many of Teasdale’s poems chart developments in her own life, from her experiences as a sheltered young woman in St. Louis, to those as a successful yet increasingly uneasy writer in New York City, to a depressed and disillusioned person who would commit suicide in 1933. Although later critics and scholars have marginalized or excluded Teasdale from canons of early 20th century American verse, she was popular in her lifetime with both the public and critics. She won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.