Abby Zimet:

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 March 15 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.” 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 spare 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.”

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