W.S. Merwin, who was the poet laureate two times, an environmental activist, and the author of my favorite poem, died yesterday (March 15) at the age of 91.
As a college sophomore, I was hesitantly taking a poetry workshop. When we were studying imagist poems, we were assigned several W.S. Merwin poems to read. “Separation” has stuck with me ever since.
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
In the video I shared last week, Naomi Shihab Nye who (of course) was friends with Merwin said, you need to find your poems. If you are looking for “your” poems, I think Merwin’s work is a wonderful place to start.
He has lived on an abandoned pineapple plantation in Hawaii for the last 30 years where he’s worked to restore the rainforest. From his time there, he wrote this poem:
Place
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
Isn’t he wonderful?
You’ll have to pardon me for sharing a few stories about his life. I think that obituaries are such a great place to learn about life (a gem I picked up from an episode of the “On Being” podcast).
Thanks by W.S. Merwin
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
