Poem of the Week, by W.S. Merwin
I still see the look in my mother’s dark eyes, decades ago, when I told her a decision I had made, one that would cause the people I most love to suffer. She reached for my hands. It will be okay, she said. Everything will be okay. And that gave me strength. Many years later she told me she hadn’t known at all that it would be okay, but I knew I had to tell you that.
Last week it was my turn to tell my mother, my lifelong love, that it would be okay. That in her absence we would take care of each other, that we would go on and be happy. I did not tell her my heart was broken, because she would have worried. It would have distracted her from the profound work of dying. She needed to be free.
Before she entirely lost her words, she leaned her head on my arm in the middle of the night and kissed it. Do you feel like you’re my mother now? she murmured. I do, I answered. Well, you’re a very nice mother, she said, and she smiled like a little girl.
Good Night, by W.S. Merwin
Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know
night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know
in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know
Click here for more information about W.S. Merwin. Today’s poem is from his collection The Shadow of Sirius and was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter
Last week the painter had a dream in which an old friend, dead in an instant two years ago now, appeared, smiling and so happy to see him. Do you think he came back because he died so fast and he wanted to say goodbye to you? I asked him when he told me about the dream. Who knows? Maybe, the painter said. Either way it was good to see him, happy and healthy. W.S. Merwin has always been a poet of dreams to me, what with his imagery and the way his unpunctuated poems float on the page. His calm voice drifts across the water, and sometimes one of his poems feels exactly right.
Alison McGhee 