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

W. S. MERWIN’S MOTION OF MIND 307

Did Hawaii once have such a verb, lying “between the earth and silence”?
In “Hearing the Names of the Valleys,” the poet free of colonial or mission-
ary motive wants to hear if not learn them.

Finally the old man is telling

the forgotten names

and the names of the stones they came from...

I have lived without knowing

the names for the water

from one rock

and the water from another

and behind the names that I do not have

the color of water flows all day and all night

the old man tells me the name for it

and as he says it I forget it

Still his years spent on limber verse have bred the tact of such lines and breaks—
and tact goes a long way toward consciousness.
“When you hear a poem,” Merwin told Bill Moyers, “you hear something
that you always knew, but it ’s completely new!” News that stays news—we
crave it in times of need. During the war in Vietnam, Merwin began translating
from Vietnamese tradition (using literal English versions). Here is a medieval
poem of place:

I will choose a place where the snakes feel safe.

All day I will love that remote country.

At times I will climb the peak of its lonely mountain

to stay and whistle until the sky grows cold.

The war’s turning point, winter 1964–65, found Merwin in France, whose impe-
rial grip on Vietnam had led to America’s. “The Asians Dying” takes the brunt
of war’s brutal news on a rural landscape.

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains

The ash the great walker follows the possessors

Forever

Nothing they will come to is real

Nor for long

Over the watercourses

Like ducks in the time of the ducks

The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky

Making a new twilight

Phrasings and images grope to imagine a scorched earth ten time zones away.
Ash “the great walker,” smoke like ghost villages, like ducks migrating, “a new
twilight.” Nature turns witness, almost accomplice, as