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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
Homing
Pigeons
Destination
Poems
Flight
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More quotes by May Sarton

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Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.
May Sarton
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O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.
May Sarton
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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
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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?
May Sarton
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Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
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It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton
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When I am alone the flowers are really seen I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
May Sarton
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we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
May Sarton
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
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I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
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And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.
May Sarton
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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
May Sarton
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
May Sarton
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Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
May Sarton
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I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton