"The Laughing Child" by W.S. Merwin

This year for National Poetry Month, I have posted lovely, moving, and powerful works by extremely talented poets. I hope you have enjoyed them as much as I have enjoyed sharing them. Let's close out our poetry celebration with a touching poem by Pulitzer Prize winner and 2010 United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin (who died only last year). This poem, his achingly beautiful "The Laughing Child" resonates with me deeply.

The Laughing Child
by W. S. Merwin

When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air
of my first January the carriage
was shaking she said and went on shaking
and she saw I was lying there laughing
she told me about it later it was
something that reassured her in a life
in which she had lost everyone she loved
before I was born and she had just begun
to believe that she might be able to
keep me as I lay there in the winter
laughing it was what she was thinking of
later when she told me that I had been
a happy child and she must have kept that
through the gray cloud of all her days and now
out of the horn of dreams of my own life
I wake again into the laughing child

https://merwinconservancy.org/

...

“It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.”
--Colette

“Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you. If they speak, you break down.”
--Bede Jarrett

“While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.”
--Samuel Johnson

“Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.”
--Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin