ETHEL RACKIN on

W. S. Merwin
Late Spring

Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies
after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting
​
you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I have opened the door
believing you were not far

Ethel Rackin is the author of three books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; and Evening (Furniture Press, 2017). Her new text is Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022). Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the 2016 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred by Elizabeth Robinson, and another collaborative sequence, "Silent e," is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, Jacket2, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Volt, and other journals. She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.