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When I am old, and young mouths
say that spring
Has ceased to work her alchemy with me:
That white thorn boughs and apple trees
in bloom
Stir me no more… that I no longer see
The courage of a fledgling taking wing…
And soft nights cause no ache in
my old breast,
They will not know that laughter at a gate
Will break my heart with memories—oh! lest
I make some commonplace remark and go
Where scent of spring and footsteps
on the grass
Are shut outside… and where there is
no room
For shadows of a gay young man to pass…
And never will they guess my feeble pulse
Still throbs at beauty and exhausts me quite,
Who, though I sit at dusk alone and still,
Have sent my venturing soul far in the night.
— “Captive”
Sanora Babb (1907-2005) lived out a rich legacy of the twentieth century. Born in a homesteader’s cabin in Oklahoma, she covered the news for the Associated Press, wrote short stories for literary magazines, and was a radio scriptwriter.
She reported on the Spanish Civil War and worked for Tom Collins, manager of the Farm Security Administration in California, during the 1930s. Later she married the celebrated film director James Wong Howe and continued to reside in Hollywood after his death.
“Babb is a writer of great skill and humanity . . . a clear-eyed observer of human behavior, a lyric poet of great sensitivity, and a gentle satirist of human folly. It is a treat to now have a selection of her poems.”
— Douglas Wixson
Babb's best-known book, Whose Names Are Unknown, chronicles the migration of Oklahoma dust bowl migrants to California during the Depression. It was withdrawn from publication by Random House in 1939 when the company received word that John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which like Babb’s book used the field notes of Tom Collins as a background source, was due to be published later the same year. Babb’s book was finally published by University of Oklahoma Press before her death in 2005.
Two of her other books, The Lost Traveler and An Owl on Every Post, were republished by University of New Mexico Press in the 1990s.