Pulitzer recipient W.S. Merwin’s poetry steeped in ecology and Buddhist philosophy

• It Is March

• It is March and black dust falls out of the books
• Soon I will be gone
• The tall spirit who lodged here has
• Left already
• On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
• Old prices

• When you look back there is always the past
• Even when it has vanished
• But when you look forward
• With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
• Bird on your shoulder
• What can you write

• The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
• The fist is coming out of the egg
• The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses

• At a certain height
• The tails of the kites for a moment are
• Covered with footsteps

• Whatever I have to do has not yet begun

• Wish

• The star in my
• Hand is falling

• All the uniforms know what’s no use

• May I bow to Necessity not
• To her hirelings

• Remembering

• There are threads of old sound heard over and over
• phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender
• wands of the auroras playing out from them
• into dark time the passing of a few
• migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
• far from the rest of the words far from the instruments

W.S. Merwin (b. September 30, 1927) is an American poet who has written more than 50 books of verse, translations and prose. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1971 and 2009) and the National Book Award for Poetry (2005), and was named the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010. His poetry is steeped in his interests in ecology and Buddhist philosophy. Having grown up in Jersey City, NJ, he now resides on a pineapple plantation in the rural region of Maui, Hawaii, where he takes an active part in restoring the islands’ rainforests.