PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1988 - William Meredith

ENVOI


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.


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from "Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems" by William Meredith,
published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 1997