Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can't take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.
 
Reprinted from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems by William Meredith, published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by William Meredith. All rights reserved; used by permission of Northwestern University Press and the author.

Poems by This Author

In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs by William Meredith
Friends making off ahead of time
Last Things by William Meredith
In the tunnel of woods, as the road
Parents by William Meredith
What it must be like to be an angel
Rhode Island by William Meredith
Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
Starlight by William Meredith
Going abruptly into a starry night
The Illiterate by William Meredith
Touching your goodness, I am like a man


Further Reading

Related Poems
Envoy
by Robert Louis Stevenson