About this poem by W.S. Merwin. With its fateful title and first lines, it begins with resigned acceptance of the inevitable, of what endures and all that passes, then reflects on the strangeness and surprising realities of this earthly sojourn: the small joys of life, our love, but also our profound failings. Yet in the end, he feels the rightness of a figurative nod or bow to the sensed but unknown authorship, creation’s process and purpose, whatever that may be. Or so he says to me.
For the Anniversary of My Death*
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
(W.S. Merwin, a favorite, is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a former Poet Laureate of the U.S.)
*From his collection, The Lice (1967)
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