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

306 PART THREE

and cut the trees

that were here in the wind

in the rain at night

it is hard to say it

but they cut the sacred ‘ohias then

the sacred koas then

the sandalwood and the halas

holding aloft their green fires

and somebody dead turned cattle loose

among the stumps until killing time

Unlike those dead men, “the trees have risen one more time.”
Ohia, koa, sandalwood, hala: Hawaii tempers Merwin’s sense that naming
exposes human arrogance. Other poems point to the native ohia, first tree to
grow on new lava, and the sandalwood. “Chord” begins with a dissonance
from the 1820s.

While Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests

while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes echoing

through the forests,

and ends on a deeper chord:

while he groaned on the voyage to Italy they fell on the trails and were

broken

when he lay with the odes behind him the wood was sold for cannons

when he lay watching the window they came home and lay down

and an age arrived when everything was explained in another language

Keats’s great odes knew nothing of this ravage. Now “another language,” co-
lonial arrogance, confronts the human tongue of poetry.
Whatever his concern—memory, history, nature, love, loss—Merwin never
stops questioning, as in “Utterance,” the word spoken or unspoken

still spinning its one syllable

between the earth and silence

The Rain in the Trees, its cover photo showing mist in Ohia Forest, contains
“Losing a Language.”

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back

yet the old still remember something that they could say

As languages go extinct, week after week, what gets lost?

many of the things the words were about

no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree

the verb for I