Where Do Our Limits Come From?

A man once found an eagle's egg and put it in the nest
of a barnyard hen. The eagle hatched and grew up with the
rest of the brood of chicks and thought he didn't look all the same.
He scratched the earth for worms and bugs and played the chickens' games.

The eagle clucked and cackled, he made a chicken's sound;
He thrashed his wings, but only flew some two feet off the ground.
That's high as chickens fly, the eagle has been told.
The year's passed and one day when the eagle was quite old

He saw something magnificent flying very high
and making great majestic circles up there in the sky,
He'd never seen the likes of it. "What's that?" he asked in awe,
While he watched in wonder at the grace and power he saw.

"Why that's an eagle," someone said, "He belongs up there, its clear.
Just as we, since we are chickens, belong earthbound down here."
The old eagle just accepted that, most everybody does.
And he lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.


Charles Osgood - The Osgood File - April 21, 1992

Poetic Leadership: 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, 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 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!

May Sarton