The poet W. S. Merwin wrote a lot about birds: birds singing, birds dying, birds “whirled in a rising cloud … dissolving, streamering out.” This poem, “Shore Birds,” was included in Merwin’s 2005 Nationwide Ebook Award–profitable assortment referred to as, sure, Migration.
Merwin, who died in 2019, was a faithful conservationist distraught over the destruction of the planet; “Shore Birds,” a couple of migrating flock, captures his profound sense of loss. “Whereas I consider them they’re rising uncommon,” he writes. After passing by a line of gunfire to the peaceable late-summer shore the place they’ve lengthy been headed, the poem’s group has misplaced members. Merwin wrote about different dwindling species, as nicely, however not with the identical persistence. What was it concerning the squawking feathered creatures that so moved him?
Merwin usually wrote about birds within the collective: the V of geese transferring as one, pushed by some shared intuition; or flying upward in a wild rush, united in track. He appears at instances to be contrasting that lovely oneness with the ugliness and division of man: those answerable for local weather change, for the weapons that shoot down the shore birds; those who work not in coordinated chaos however in calculated, systematic violence. A few of his poems—particularly in his assortment The Lice, revealed throughout the Vietnam Warfare, which Merwin vehemently opposed—radiate fury with humankind. “Grey whale,” he writes in “For a Coming Extinction,” “Now that we’re sending you to The Finish / That nice god / Inform him / That we who comply with you invented forgiveness / And forgive nothing.”
As Merwin grew older, although, he started to melt towards humanity. “One can’t dwell solely in despair and anger with out finally destroying the factor one is offended in protection of,” he stated, explaining how his perspective had modified since The Lice. “The world continues to be right here, and there are points of human life that aren’t purely damaging.” I ponder, then, if it’s intentional that the time period migration has a double connotation; it makes me suppose first not of birds however of individuals. Maybe he was implying that the 2 have one thing in widespread: every able to making nice and harmful journeys, touring collectively to a degree they’ll’t but see.
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