The Lost Originals
If only you had written our language
we would have remembered how you died
if you had wakened at our windows
we would have known who you were
we would have felt horror
at the pictures of you behind the barbed wire
from which you did not emerge
we would have returned to the shots of you lying dead with your kin
we would have ached to hear of your freezing
and your hunger in the hands of our own kind
we would have suffered at the degradation of your women
we would have studied you reverently
we would have repeated the words of your children
we would have been afraid for you
you would have made us ashamed and indignant
and righteous
we would have been proud of you
we would have mourned you
you would have survived
as we do
we might have believed
in a homeland
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 is the author of many books of poetry. Among them: A Mask for Janus, Yale University Press, 1952; Green with Beasts, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956; The Drunk in the Furnace, Macmillan, 1960; The Lice, Atheneum, 1967; The Carrier of Ladders, Atheneum, 1970; The Compass Flower, Atheneum, 1977; Opening the Hand, Atheneum, 1983; The Rain in the Trees, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988; Travels, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; The Vixen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983, Copper Canyon Press, 1997; The Folding Cliffs, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; The River Sound, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999; The Pupil, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; Migration: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005; Present Company, Copper Canyon Press, 2007; The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, 2008; The Moon Before Morning, Copper Canyon Press, 2014.
His poetry has been published in such periodicals as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Partisan Review, Antaeus, Iowa Review, The Yale Review, and many others.
His other honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010 to 2011. (Poets.org).
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 - March 15, 2019)
If only you had written our language
we would have remembered how you died
if you had wakened at our windows
we would have known who you were
we would have felt horror
at the pictures of you behind the barbed wire
from which you did not emerge
we would have returned to the shots of you lying dead with your kin
we would have ached to hear of your freezing
and your hunger in the hands of our own kind
we would have suffered at the degradation of your women
we would have studied you reverently
we would have repeated the words of your children
we would have been afraid for you
you would have made us ashamed and indignant
and righteous
we would have been proud of you
we would have mourned you
you would have survived
as we do
we might have believed
in a homeland
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 is the author of many books of poetry. Among them: A Mask for Janus, Yale University Press, 1952; Green with Beasts, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956; The Drunk in the Furnace, Macmillan, 1960; The Lice, Atheneum, 1967; The Carrier of Ladders, Atheneum, 1970; The Compass Flower, Atheneum, 1977; Opening the Hand, Atheneum, 1983; The Rain in the Trees, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988; Travels, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; The Vixen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983, Copper Canyon Press, 1997; The Folding Cliffs, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998; The River Sound, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999; The Pupil, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; Migration: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005; Present Company, Copper Canyon Press, 2007; The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, 2008; The Moon Before Morning, Copper Canyon Press, 2014.
His poetry has been published in such periodicals as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Partisan Review, Antaeus, Iowa Review, The Yale Review, and many others.
His other honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010 to 2011. (Poets.org).
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 - March 15, 2019)
“Belatedly, we mourn the passing of W.S. Merwin, masterful poet as well as fierce environmentalist and defender of justice, who died in his sleep Friday [March 15] at 91 at his home on Maui, where over several decades he and his wife built an 18-acre palm forest ‘as fearless and graceful (as) the power of imagination and renewal.’
ReplyDelete“The former Poet Laureate and award-winning author of over 20 books held fast to ‘an intellectual and moral consistency,’ exploring loss, war, nature and age in stirring language that grew increasingly sparse and grave; in Worn Words, one of his final poems, he lauded ‘the late poems/ that are made of words/that have come the whole way.’ Still, the son of a Presbyterian minister who became a lifetime Buddhist insisted, ‘What we know is nothing in comparison with what we don’t know.’ Wisdom, he once said, is ‘the question that you can't answer.’
“Merwin revered the natural world and tirelessly raged against those destroying it through war, colonialism or industrialization. Nonetheless, he also mindfully chose to listen and give often-tender thanks, arguing in 2014's Living with the News that ‘the only hope is to be the daylight.’
“He stayed true to that principle even when distant from nature, when remembering wars, funerals, the rich, ‘the police at the door, the beatings on stairs...the animals dying around us...the forests falling faster than the minutes/of our lives: with the cities growing over us/ we are saying thank you faster and faster/with nobody listening we are saying thank you/thank you we are saying and waving/dark though it is.’
“He received arguably every honor possible for a poet, including some he refused. In ‘an act of mourning,’ he famously rejected the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders in protest against the Vietnam War. ‘I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace,’ he wrote, welcoming it only ‘as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.’
ReplyDelete“He donated his prize winnings to antiwar causes, a move his friend and mentor W.H. Auden denounced. He also turned down, but later accepted, membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was named this country's Poet Laureate; he also won a National Book Award for Migration in 2005, a second Pulitzer in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius (which he accepted), and many other honors.
“In 1977, Merwin moved to Hawaii, where he and his wife Paula bought a former pineapple plantation overlooking the ocean - a ‘paradise lost’ devastated by deforestation and chemical residues. Over four decades, they created a forest of 3,000 palm trees encompassing 400 often-rare species from around the world; they also built and lived in a solar-powered house. ‘I can't stop them from destroying the Amazon Forest,’ he argued, ‘but I can go out and plant a tree.’
“In 2010, they founded The Merwin Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving their legacy; it is profiled in the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning. ‘He discovered it, and it discovered something in him,’ said fellow-poet Edward Hirsch. ‘He found a way of being to believe in. He dug in - tending the land, tending his poetry.’ Of his passing, Hirsch mourns, ‘He is like a great pine tree that has fallen’ (The Only Hope Is to be the Daylight by Abby Zimet, Common Dreams, March 17, 2019).
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2019/03/17/only-hope-be-daylight
Place by W.S. Merwin
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
what for
not for the fruit
the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted
I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time
with the sun already
going down
and the water
touching its roots
in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing
one by one
over its leaves