A Grain of Mustard Seed by May Sarton Page A

the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
    Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
    Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

Part One

Ballad of the Sixties
    In the west of the country where I was
    Hoping for some good news,
    Only the cripple had fire,
    Only the cripple knew the mind’s desire;
    In the wheel chair alone
    Poetry met the eyes
    That see and recognize,
    There in the wizened bone.
For only the ill are well,
And only the mad are sane.
This is the sad truth plain,
The story I have to tell.
    In the North of the country where I saw
    The anxious rich and the angry poor,
    Only the blasted life had reason;
    Only the stricken in the bitter season
    Looked out of loss and learned
    The waste of all that burned,
    Once cared and burned.
For only the mad are sane,
And only the lost are well,
And loss of fire the bane
Of this season in Hell.
    In the South of the country where I passed
    Looking for faith and hope at last,
    Only the black man knew
    The false dream from the true;
    Only the dark and grieving
    Could be the still believing.
For only the ill are well,
Only the hunted, free,
So the story I have to tell
In the South was told to me.
    In the East of the country where I came
    Back to my house, back to my name,
    Only the crazy girl was clear
    That all has been betrayed to fear;
    Only the mad girl knew the cost,
    And she, shut up from wind and rain
    And safely plucked out from her pain,
    Knew that our love is lost, is lost.
For only the sick are well;
The mad alone have truth to tell
In the mad games they play—
Our love has withered away.

The Rock in the Snowball
    ( for Mark Howe )
    How little I knew you, Mark, to mourn so wild
    As if death hit square in the mouth today.
    That snowball held a rock and it hurt hard.
    But even outraged, am I still a child
    To take death with raw grief and howl my way
    Hand against mouth to ward off the word?
    How little I knew you, Mark, but for the blue
    Those deep-set eyes shafted across a room
    To prick the ghost of pride or of pretence,
    That straight look into doom if it were true,
    That poker look that made our laughter bloom
    And burned up sham like paper with a glance.
    You were exposed, a man stripped down to care,
    Thin as a boy, tempest-torn as a boy,
    And sick with pity, conscience-caught-and-bound.
    Courage