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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

May Sarton

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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Pigeons
Destination
Poems
Flight
Like
Homing

More quotes by May Sarton

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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
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Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
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People who cannot feel punish those who do.
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It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
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In the country of pain we are each alone.
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
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The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
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each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
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Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
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[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .
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An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
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I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.
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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
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Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton