W. S. Merwin spent much of his life writing about things that disappear: languages, forests, animals, memories, places, people, and moments that vanish almost as soon as we become aware of them. Yet his poetry rarely treats disappearance as a reason to stop looking. If anything, the knowledge that something may be lost makes attention more urgent.
Born on September 30, 1927, William Stanley Merwin became one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. During a career spanning more than six decades, he published dozens of books of poetry and translation, won two Pulitzer Prizes, received the National Book Award, and served as Poet Laureate of the United States. His poetic style changed dramatically over the years, moving from carefully structured early verse toward the flowing, largely unpunctuated poems for which he became famous.
At the same time, Merwin created another kind of life’s work on the Hawaiian island of Maui. On land that had been damaged by logging, erosion, and commercial agriculture, he and his wife Paula gradually cultivated an extraordinary forest containing hundreds of species of palms. The poet who spent decades writing about vanished landscapes also spent decades bringing one back to life.
The poetry and the forest were never really separate projects. Both grew from the same conviction: the world deserves our attention while it is still here.
🌿 A Minister’s Son
William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Merwin grew up first in Union City, New Jersey, and later in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Religion, language, and the rhythms of scripture entered his life early, and he began composing hymns for his father when he was still a small child.
Those childhood hymns provide an interesting beginning for a poet who would eventually become known for poetry stripped of conventional punctuation and traditional religious certainty. Before he rebelled against inherited forms, he learned their rhythms. The language of sermons, hymns, biblical stories, and prayer gave him an early awareness that words could possess musical and ceremonial power.
Merwin also became an intense reader. He later recalled being drawn first to prose writers such as Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy before poetry became the central pursuit of his life. Reading opened worlds beyond the communities in which he grew up and eventually led him toward languages, translation, travel, and literary traditions far removed from his childhood surroundings.
The young boy writing hymns could hardly have known that language would become the organizing force of his life.
📚 Princeton and the Making of a Poet
Merwin attended Princeton University on scholarship, where he studied with the influential critic R. P. Blackmur and encountered the poet John Berryman, who was teaching there. His classmates included Galway Kinnell, another writer who would become an important American poet.
At Princeton, Merwin began reading poetry with greater seriousness and writing continually. He graduated in 1948 and stayed an additional year to study Romance languages, an interest that would eventually make translation almost as important to his literary career as his original poetry.
Languages offered Merwin more than practical skill. Every language contained another way of shaping reality. Words carried histories, rhythms, assumptions, and ways of seeing that could not always be transferred neatly into English. Translation therefore became a lifelong education in the possibilities and limitations of language.
Soon after leaving Princeton, Merwin traveled to Europe, beginning a period of movement that took him through Spain, France, England, and other countries. Those years immersed him in older European literary traditions while giving him experiences far removed from the American poetic world he had known as a student.
🌍 Europe, Robert Graves & a Life Among Languages
In 1950, Merwin went to Majorca, where he worked as a tutor to the son of poet Robert Graves. Living near Graves placed the young writer within the orbit of an established poet deeply interested in mythology, ancient literature, poetic tradition, and the origins of language.
Merwin continued traveling and living abroad during the 1950s, spending time in London and southern France. Translation increasingly became a professional as well as artistic pursuit, and his knowledge of French, Spanish, Latin, and other literary traditions expanded the range of poetry available to him.
These years left a clear mark on Merwin’s earliest books. Medieval poetry, classical mythology, formal verse, ballads, songs, and traditional structures all appear in the work of the young poet.
This may seem surprising to readers who know the later Merwin, whose poems often float down the page without punctuation and appear almost freed from conventional form. Yet the transformation makes more sense when we remember how thoroughly he had first mastered inherited structures.
Merwin did not abandon formal poetry because he could not write it.
He moved beyond it because he had already learned what it could teach him.
🎭 A Mask for Janus
Merwin’s first poetry collection, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952 after W. H. Auden selected it for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
The book displayed remarkable technical skill. Its poems drew upon classical and medieval traditions and employed forms that revealed how deeply Merwin had studied older literature. Auden recognized the young poet’s craftsmanship, and the prize immediately established Merwin as a writer to watch.
Yet Merwin would not spend the rest of his career reproducing the style that first brought him recognition.
That willingness to change became one of his defining characteristics.
Many writers discover a successful voice and protect it. Merwin repeatedly dismantled his own methods. The polished formal poet of the early 1950s gradually became something stranger, sparer, more uncertain, and more distinctly his own.
The evolution took years.
But eventually the transformation would be unmistakable.
🖋️ Searching for Another Voice
Collections such as Green with Beasts and The Drunk in the Furnace began revealing a poet moving away from the elaborate formalism of his first book.
Merwin returned to the United States in the mid-1950s and spent time around the literary community in Boston, where writers including Robert Lowell were reshaping American poetry. Yet Merwin never fit neatly inside a single poetic movement.
His writing became less decorative and increasingly direct. Lines loosened. Traditional structures weakened. American landscapes and contemporary anxieties entered more fully.
The change was not merely stylistic. Merwin was becoming increasingly concerned with war, environmental destruction, language, alienation, and the dangerous assumption that human beings somehow stand outside the natural world.
The old forms no longer seemed sufficient for what he wanted to say.
By the 1960s, another Merwin had emerged.
🌑 The Lice
Published in 1967, The Lice marked one of the great transformations in Merwin’s career.
The poems are spare, unsettling, prophetic, and often haunted by destruction. War, extinction, environmental devastation, violence, and human estrangement from the living world move through the collection. Instead of reassuring readers that civilization represents progress, Merwin asks what humanity is destroying in the process.
The timing mattered. The Vietnam War was escalating, nuclear anxiety remained part of everyday life, environmental awareness was growing, and political turmoil was reshaping the United States.
Merwin’s poems did not read like newspaper editorials. Their power came through images, silences, repetitions, and the sense that something immense was disappearing just beyond the edge of language.
The natural world appears frequently, but not as pleasant scenery. Animals, forests, water, and landscapes exist inside a world increasingly threatened by human behavior.
The Lice helped establish the poetic voice now most closely associated with Merwin.
It also made environmental loss inseparable from his art.
✍️ The Disappearing Punctuation
One of the most recognizable features of Merwin’s mature poetry is the absence of punctuation.
He did not begin his career this way. His early poems were often highly structured and conventionally punctuated. Gradually, however, punctuation began disappearing from the work until poems seemed to move almost entirely through the rhythm of their lines.
The effect can be unusual at first.
Without commas and periods telling the reader exactly where to pause, a sentence can flow into the next possibility. A phrase may seem connected with what comes before it and then, a moment later, reveal another relationship with what follows.
Meaning becomes slightly unstable.
That instability is part of the experience.
Merwin’s poems ask readers to listen rather than simply follow grammatical instructions. The line itself becomes a guide. Breath, rhythm, repetition, and intuition help determine how the poem moves.
The result often feels closer to thought or memory than to ordinary prose.
Ideas arrive.
Images appear.
One moment moves into another before we have completely understood the first.
The form mirrors a world in which certainty is always disappearing.
🕊️ Poetry in the Vietnam Era
Merwin’s opposition to the Vietnam War became an important part of his public and literary life. His antiwar convictions appeared in his poetry, but he also expressed them directly through public actions.
When The Carrier of Ladders received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971, Merwin announced that he intended to donate the prize money to antiwar causes. The decision generated public debate, including an exchange with W. H. Auden, who had once selected Merwin’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
The disagreement illustrates how far Merwin had traveled from the young formal poet Auden had recognized two decades earlier. Poetry for Merwin had become inseparable from questions of responsibility, violence, and what language could do in a destructive world.
Yet Merwin’s political poetry rarely depended upon slogans. He understood that poems operate differently from speeches or arguments. A poem could make the reader feel the absence left by something destroyed, or recognize the relationship between violence against people and violence against the earth.
Anger mattered.
But attention mattered too.
🪜 The Carrier of Ladders
The Carrier of Ladders, published in 1970, brought Merwin his first Pulitzer Prize.
The collection continued the stylistic and philosophical developments visible in The Lice. Language became increasingly stripped down, while the poems explored loss, memory, violence, estrangement, and the unstable relationship between human beings and the world around them.
The title itself is characteristic of Merwin.
A ladder suggests movement between levels.
It allows a person to climb.
But the carrier of ladders is someone burdened by the instrument of ascent rather than necessarily using it.
Merwin frequently creates images like this—simple enough to picture immediately but difficult to reduce to one meaning.
His poems invite interpretation without surrendering their mystery.
That openness is one reason they reward rereading. A Merwin poem encountered at twenty may feel different at fifty because the poem leaves room for the reader’s life to enter it.
🌎 Translation as a Second Literary Life
Merwin was not simply a poet who occasionally translated other writers. Translation formed one of the central pillars of his career.
Over the decades, he translated poetry and literature from numerous languages and traditions. His work included translations connected with Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Osip Mandelstam, Dante, medieval literature, and Japanese poetry, among many others.
Later projects included his acclaimed versions of Dante’s Purgatorio, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and, with Takako Lento, the haiku of Yosa Buson.
Translation shaped Merwin’s own poetry in profound ways. Working intimately with literature from other languages exposed him to structures and ideas that did not necessarily resemble contemporary American poetry.
It also taught humility.
A translator is constantly reminded that words do not match perfectly across languages.
Something is always shifting.
A rhythm changes.
An association disappears.
Another possibility emerges.
Meaning survives, but not unchanged.
That recognition resembles Merwin’s broader poetic understanding of the world itself.
Everything continues by changing.
🌊 Moving Toward Hawaiʻi
In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaiʻi, initially drawn there in part through his study of Zen Buddhism with teacher Robert Aitken.
The move transformed both his daily life and his later writing.
Merwin eventually settled on Maui, where he and Paula Dunaway, whom he married in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983, established a home on land that had been severely degraded by previous human use.
The area had experienced logging, erosion, and agricultural exploitation, including pineapple cultivation. Its soil was damaged and much of its original ecological richness had been lost.
Merwin did not arrive with a grand plan to create one of the world’s remarkable palm collections.
He began planting.
One tree led to another.
Then another.
The work continued for decades.
🌴 Planting a Forest
Over more than forty years, William and Paula Merwin transformed their Maui property into an extraordinary tropical landscape.
They planted palms.
Many palms.
Species came from around the world, including rare and endangered varieties. Over time, the land developed into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens anywhere, while the larger ecosystem around the trees recovered as well.
This was not ornamental gardening in the ordinary sense.
The Merwins were participating in restoration.
Soil improved.
Shade returned.
Life accumulated.
A landscape damaged by extractive agriculture became biologically rich again.
The project gave physical form to ideas Merwin had explored in poetry for decades. Human beings could destroy landscapes, but they could also choose to care for them.
Restoration could not return the land to some imaginary untouched past.
It could, however, create conditions in which life might flourish again.
The poet who wrote about loss had begun answering loss with planting.
🌱 A Tree as an Act of Faith
Planting a tree requires a particular relationship with time.
The person planting may never see the tree at maturity.
Someone else may sit beneath its shade.
Birds that have not yet been born may nest in it.
The planter acts for a future that cannot be possessed.
This quality makes Merwin’s forest almost inseparable from his poetry.
A poem works similarly.
The writer does not know who will eventually read it.
A book may outlive its author.
Words written in one century may suddenly become important to someone in another.
Both poetry and planting require a willingness to create without controlling what happens next.
Merwin spent decades doing both.
He planted sentences.
He planted trees.
Then he allowed them to continue beyond him.
🌧️ The Rain in the Trees
Merwin’s environmental concerns became especially prominent in The Rain in the Trees, published in 1988.
The collection considers forests, indigenous cultures, colonialism, ecological destruction, and the human tendency to treat the living world as raw material. Hawaiʻi gave Merwin a particularly powerful vantage point because the islands carry visible histories of environmental transformation, introduced species, plantation agriculture, and cultural displacement.
Trees in Merwin’s poetry are not passive decorations.
They possess lives extending beyond the human scale.
A tree may have stood before the speaker was born.
If spared, it may remain after the speaker dies.
This temporal difference changes the way the human figure appears.
We are temporary.
The forest operates according to another clock.
Merwin’s poems repeatedly encourage readers to imagine time beyond the boundaries of an individual life.
That shift in perspective lies at the heart of ecological thinking.
🍃 Learning to Pay Attention
Attention may be the single most important practice running through Merwin’s later work.
Look at the tree before it is cut down.
Listen to the bird before it disappears.
Remember the language before its last speaker dies.
Notice the person before they become memory.
Pay attention while there is still something to attend to.
This sounds simple.
It is not.
Modern life encourages distraction. Economic systems frequently treat forests, animals, oceans, and landscapes according to their usefulness rather than their existence. Even human relationships can become invisible through habit.
Merwin’s poetry resists that carelessness.
To pay attention is to recognize that something exists independently of our desire to use it.
A tree does not need to become lumber in order to matter.
A bird does not need to entertain us.
A forest does not need to justify itself economically.
The world possesses value before we arrive.
🧘 Buddhism & the Changing Self
Merwin’s engagement with Buddhism became another important influence on his later life and poetry.
Zen practice reinforced ideas already present in his work: impermanence, attention, silence, the limitations of the individual ego, and the difficulty of separating the self from the larger world.
The connection between Buddhist thought and Merwin’s poetry can be felt without turning every poem into a religious statement.
A leaf falls.
A person remembers someone who has died.
Light changes.
A season passes.
A sentence disappears into silence.
Nothing remains fixed.
Rather than treating impermanence solely as tragedy, Merwin increasingly approached it as the condition under which life exists.
Things matter not despite their transience but partly because of it.
The present will not remain.
Therefore look carefully.
🕯️ Memory & the Missing
Merwin’s poems frequently address people and places that are no longer available.
Memory becomes a strange form of presence.
Someone dies, yet a voice remains inside the mind.
A childhood home disappears, yet rooms continue in memory.
A landscape is destroyed, but the person who knew it can still imagine the shape it once had.
This creates one of Merwin’s characteristic emotional tensions.
The remembered thing is both present and absent.
We can summon it but cannot return to it.
Language becomes the place where this contradiction survives.
A poem cannot resurrect the dead.
It can preserve attention to the fact that they were here.
For Merwin, that may be enough to make poetry necessary.
🌌 The Shadow of Sirius
Late in his career, Merwin produced one of his most celebrated books, The Shadow of Sirius.
Published in 2008, the collection received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009, giving Merwin his second Pulitzer nearly four decades after The Carrier of Ladders.
The distance between those awards is extraordinary.
The first recognized a poet still moving through one of the great stylistic transformations of his career.
The second recognized an elder poet writing with remarkable clarity about memory, aging, mortality, time, and the natural world.
The poems in The Shadow of Sirius often feel lighter on the page than the subjects they contain. Merwin had reached a stage in which enormous ideas could be approached through almost weightless language.
Age had not made his poetry more certain.
It had made uncertainty itself feel familiar.
🏆 A National Book Award & a Lifetime of Recognition
By the twenty-first century, Merwin had accumulated nearly every major honor available to an American poet.
His Migration: New & Selected Poems received the National Book Award, bringing together decades of work and allowing readers to witness the remarkable evolution of his style across a single volume.
He also received honors including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and major recognition for his translations.
Awards can sometimes make a writer’s career look neatly progressive.
Merwin’s was not.
He changed direction repeatedly.
He abandoned successful methods.
He traveled.
He translated.
He became politically outspoken.
He moved thousands of miles away from the literary centers of New York and Boston.
He planted trees.
The coherence appeared not through a fixed style but through recurring questions.
What are we losing?
What do we love?
What survives?
How should we live while it is still here?
🇺🇸 U.S. Poet Laureate
In 2010, Merwin was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 2010–2011 term.
By then, he was in his eighties and living quietly in Hawaiʻi, far from the conventional centers of American literary life. The appointment brought him temporarily into a highly public national role.
Merwin used that visibility to continue discussing poetry, imagination, nature, and the responsibilities humans carry toward the world around them.
The appointment was particularly appropriate because Merwin had spent decades demonstrating that poetry could connect intimate experience with enormously public questions.
War.
Environmental destruction.
Extinction.
Memory.
Language.
Mortality.
None of these subjects belonged solely to governments or institutions.
They entered individual lives.
Poetry could meet them there.
🌴 The Merwin Conservancy
In 2010, William and Paula Merwin established the Merwin Conservancy to protect the Maui home and forest they had spent decades creating.
The land was placed under a permanent conservation easement in 2014, helping ensure that the forest would continue beyond the lives of the people who planted it.
The decision transformed a private life’s work into a public legacy.
A garden can easily disappear after the gardener dies.
Property can be subdivided.
Trees can be removed.
New owners can decide that something else is more profitable.
The Conservancy was created to prevent that ending.
Merwin’s forest therefore became another form of publication.
He placed it into the future.
Readers could inherit the poems.
Other generations could inherit the trees.
🌳 The Poet Who Actually Planted the Forest
Descriptions of writers often become metaphorical.
A poet “plants ideas.”
A writer “cultivates language.”
A book “grows.”
With Merwin, the metaphors become literal.
He actually planted the trees.
This is part of what makes his environmental legacy so powerful. He did not only write poems mourning damaged ecosystems. He spent years physically restoring land.
The work was slow.
There was no dramatic moment when the project became complete.
A forest does not work that way.
You plant.
You water.
You observe.
Some trees survive.
Some do not.
You plant again.
Decades pass.
Eventually the place becomes something the younger planter could barely have imagined.
That patience feels deeply connected to Merwin’s understanding of poetry.
👁️ Writing as Witness
Merwin’s environmental poetry is sometimes described as activism, but another useful word is witness.
The poet notices what is happening.
The poet names what is disappearing.
The poet refuses to behave as though destruction is invisible.
This does not guarantee change.
Merwin understood that poems do not possess magical political power.
A poem cannot regrow a forest simply by describing one.
But language can preserve awareness.
It can challenge the stories human beings tell themselves about progress, ownership, and endless resources.
It can remind readers that the world existed before them and will, one hopes, continue afterward.
Witness cannot replace action.
But action often begins with seeing.
🌎 A Poet of Environmental Consciousness
Long before climate change became an everyday subject of public conversation, Merwin was writing about ecological loss, human arrogance, endangered species, damaged landscapes, and the consequences of treating nature as something separate from ourselves.
His environmental vision avoided the comforting assumption that nature exists somewhere far away in pristine wilderness.
Human beings are part of the same world they damage.
The air enters us.
Water passes through us.
Food becomes the body.
Trees alter the atmosphere.
Animals and plants occupy systems in which human survival is also embedded.
Merwin’s poetry repeatedly challenges the illusion of separation.
The environmental crisis is not happening somewhere outside humanity.
It includes us.
🐦 Animals, Trees & Other Lives
One reason Merwin’s poems feel ecologically rich is that humans do not automatically occupy the center of every scene.
Birds appear.
Trees stand.
Animals move through landscapes.
The moon rises whether anyone notices it or not.
This can create a humbling shift in perspective.
Human literature naturally tends to focus on human concerns, yet Merwin asks readers to imagine a world filled with other forms of attention and existence.
A bird does not exist to symbolize human freedom.
A tree does not exist merely to become an image in a poem.
They have lives outside our interpretation of them.
Acknowledging that independence becomes part of Merwin’s ethic.
The world is more than what it means to us.
🌙 Aging Without Looking Away
As Merwin grew older, time and mortality became increasingly prominent in his poetry.
The changes were natural. Friends died. His own body aged. Memory accumulated. The landscape around him contained trees he had planted decades earlier when both he and the forest were younger.
Aging created another perspective on impermanence.
The person who plants a sapling eventually stands beneath a tree far taller than himself.
The future begins becoming the past.
A life that once seemed to stretch ahead now contains more memory than expectation.
Merwin approached these realities without pretending death could be defeated.
Instead, his late poems often become even more attentive to the present.
The world is temporary.
So is the observer.
That makes the moment of seeing astonishing.
✍️ Writing After Losing Sight
During the later years of his life, Merwin’s eyesight deteriorated significantly.
For a poet whose work depended so intensely upon visual attention, this represented a profound change. Yet he continued composing poems, increasingly relying upon memory, sound, dictation, and assistance.
His 2016 collection Garden Time belongs to this late period.
The title feels almost inevitable.
The garden had become time made visible.
Trees planted decades earlier now surrounded the aging poet.
The human life and the forest had grown together.
Even when sight diminished, memory remained full of landscapes.
A person can lose the ability to see a tree clearly and still know that tree through years of attention.
Perhaps this is one of the final lessons in Merwin’s work.
Attention accumulates.
What we truly notice becomes part of us.
💚 Paula Merwin
Paula Dunaway Merwin was central to the life W. S. Merwin created in Hawaiʻi.
Together, William and Paula restored the land, developed the palm collection, and eventually established the Conservancy that would protect their home and forest.
Paula died in 2017.
Her death left another absence within a life already deeply concerned with memory and loss.
William remained at their Maui home, surrounded by the forest they had cultivated together.
A landscape can become a kind of shared biography.
Every tree remembers a decision.
Every path contains years of walking.
Every mature palm testifies to someone having placed it in the ground long before.
After one person is gone, the landscape continues carrying traces of the life built together.
🕯️ The Death of W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin died peacefully at his home on Maui on March 15, 2019. He was ninety-one years old.
By then, he had published more than fifty books across poetry, prose, and translation and had spent more than forty years caring for the land surrounding his home.
The setting of his death feels inseparable from the story of his life.
He did not die in a literary capital.
He died inside the forest.
The trees he had planted surrounded him.
Some were already decades old.
Others would continue growing after he was gone.
For a poet so concerned with mortality, disappearance, and what continues beyond the self, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting final landscape.
🌱 What the Forest Means
The Merwin palm forest offers an unusual kind of literary monument.
Most writers leave manuscripts.
Libraries.
Homes.
Desks.
Books.
Merwin left all of those things, but he also left living organisms.
The forest changes every day.
Leaves fall.
New leaves emerge.
Trees grow taller.
Storms alter the landscape.
Seeds become plants.
Animals arrive and leave.
The monument refuses to remain still.
That makes it particularly appropriate for Merwin.
His poetry continually resists the fantasy that anything can be frozen permanently.
Language changes.
Memory changes.
Landscapes change.
People disappear.
The forest survives by changing too.
🌟 Why W. S. Merwin Still Matters
W. S. Merwin’s poetry feels increasingly relevant because the losses he spent decades writing about have become more difficult to ignore.
Forests continue disappearing.
Species continue declining.
Languages continue vanishing.
Climate change is altering landscapes within human lifetimes.
War continues destroying places that people once assumed would always be there.
Merwin does not offer an easy solution to these realities.
His poetry offers something more fundamental.
Attention.
Before protecting something, we have to recognize that it matters.
Before mourning something, we have to know that it existed.
Before understanding loss, we have to notice what is being lost.
Merwin spent his life practicing that form of attention.
Then he planted a forest as though attention might become action.
🎂 Remembering W. S. Merwin
Born on September 30, 1927, W. S. Merwin began writing hymns as a child and ended his life surrounded by a tropical forest he had helped bring into being.
Between those two points stretched one of the most extraordinary careers in modern American poetry.
He mastered traditional forms and then abandoned many of them. He traveled across languages and continents. He translated poets from other centuries and cultures. He wrote against war. He wrote about extinction and ecological destruction long before environmental crisis occupied its present place in public consciousness. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and eventually became U.S. Poet Laureate.
Yet the awards seem almost secondary beside the larger pattern of his life.
Merwin kept asking what human beings do with the things they love when they know those things can disappear.
His answer was not entirely hopeful.
Poetry cannot prevent every loss.
Neither can planting.
Trees die.
Languages vanish.
People leave.
Landscapes change.
But the possibility of loss does not make care meaningless. It makes care urgent.
Write the poem.
Translate the voice that might otherwise remain unheard.
Remember the person.
Protect the land.
Plant the tree.
Pay attention.
For W. S. Merwin, those actions were different expressions of the same impulse: to recognize the world while it is here and to leave something living behind.
The Animals
All these years behind windows
With blind crosses sweeping the tables
And myself tracking over empty ground
Animals I never saw
I with no voice
Remembering names to invent for them
Will any come back will one
Saying yes
Saying look carefully yes
We will meet again
-W. S. Merwin, from The Second Four Books of Poems
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