Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

W. S. MERWIN’S MOTION OF MIND 305

what is your opinion of those square miles of black plastic

where do you think the plastic goes when the crop is over

what do you think becomes of the land when the crop is over

do you think the growers know best do you think this is for your own

good

And so it goes, politely harassing.
Adopting Hawaii as home ground, he wrote The Folding Cliffs, a verse novel
Hughes called “the tragic history of Hawaii... told almost as if by a native.”
Merwin and his poems quietly, urgently work to save what once was a bioregion
of native birds, plantlife, languages. From “Rain at Night”:

after an age of leaves and feathers

someone dead

thought of this mountain as money

Cover, Fred Bodsworth, The Last of the Curlews, illustrated by T. M. Shortt

(New York: Dodd Mead, 1955).