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This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.

W. S. Merwin

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W. S. Merwin
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: September 30
Died: 2019
Died: March 15
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
William Stanley Merwin
Night
Moon
Unseen
Many
Along
Racing
Wind
Rising
Tree
Falling
Heard
Trees
Lasts
Clouds
Lashing
Last
Rain
Tiles
Fall
Air
December

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So this is what I am Pondering his eyes that could not Conceive that I was a creature to run from I who have always believed too much in words
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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
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To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
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Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
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Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
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Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.
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I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.
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My cradle was a shoe.
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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
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You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
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I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
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But most love poetry is awful nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
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Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.
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My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W. S. Merwin
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I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
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I offer you what I have my Poverty
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