Poetry Sunday: For a Coming Extinction and Place by W.S. Merwin (with update)

(Update: There is a lovely remembrance of Merwin in the NYT opinion section of March 19. Here's a link.)

We lost another great poet last week. W.S. Merwin died at his home in Hawaii on Friday. He was 91.

Merwin was not once but twice named as poet laureate of the United States. He was also a winner of the National Book Award and of two Pulitzer Prizes. 

In addition to being a poet, he was an environmental activist who cared deeply about conservation issues. His poetry often reflected those concerns. Here are two such poems.

The first is a kind of request for forgiveness from those animals, represented by the gray whale, that we have sent to The End. In the fourth stanza, he lists some of those other animals and asks that the whale add his voice to theirs and "Tell him that it is we who are important." Not a very humble way to ask for forgiveness, is it? Rather hubristic. And human.  

The second one strikes quite a different note. It speaks of the end of the world (for humans) and of how the poet would want to spend that day. He would plant a tree:

 in the earth full of the dead

 and the clouds passing

 one by one
 over its leaves

I admit I love that image of the tree that lives on when we are gone.

For a Coming Extinction

by W. S. Merwin


Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him
That it is we who are important

`````

Place

by W. S. Merwin

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not 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