When our family was complete.

I try to be happy whenever I can. I don’t fret about what’s past and we don’t know if there will be a future, so I make as much as I can out of what’s here now.

The day after I got married.

I have a lot to be grateful for, but right now, being married. Having time to be with my husband and his children. I feel very grateful.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.

Happiness springs from having found a form of expression that also earns recognition.

Once in a while it vanishes—in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three. This coming and going of the inner life—because this is what it is—is a curse and a blessing. ... A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness.

This is a French expression, silence radio, which is used in the navy, for example—when you cannot use the radio because the enemy is near. It’s not an expression I use regularly; I used it once, maybe, to describe my period of inner silence, which mostly happens when I’m back home, coming from Houston. The long weeks or months of silence. So it’s the opposite of inspiration; it’s the time of doing other things. Waiting.

So you are always confronted with life, with somebody’s life, not just intellect. You have to respect it; that’s the mystery of being with other people, that you are not with minds, your are with everything—with their sorrows and joys.

This poem—I still remember the emotion which accompanied its beginnings, actually just the birth of the line “try to praise the mutilated world”; it happened in a train in Germany, I think (trains are good for inspiration, sometimes). It was for me a simple juxtaposition of two contrary deeply felt convictions.