W. S. Merwin

“Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

“part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you”

“My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.”

“I offer you what I have my Poverty”

“from what we cannot hold the stars are made”

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”

“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”

“I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one...”

“Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value.”

“I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.”