The Laureate Is Dead, Long Live the Laureate! (Too Bad We Can't Say the Same for the Gulf)

We got a new U.S. Poet Laureate today: it's W.S. Merwin who has won 2 Pulitzers and a National Book Award, on top of living in Hawaii growing an honest-to-God rainforest in his backyard. I love, too, how nobody cares about it, there's no election or slogans or tattling to the newspapers like there has been recently with the Oxford Poetry Chair.

But one of the poems quoted in a story about our Versifier-in-Chief strikes me as really apropos considering the Deepwater Horizon disastrophe. Yes, that's still going on - 73 days and counting. Just because it's not on the news every day doesn't mean anything's actually changed. 

(Side note: if I programmed any of the news networks I'd have a little picture-in-picture cam running all day and night showing real-time footage of the spill and a "24"-style ticking clock to remind any and everybody. I must be a flaming liberal because just thinking about this enrages me to the point of near-irrationality.)

And just when you think it's worse, you find out that right now it's #4 with a bullet and rising fast in the list of world's largest oil spills. Ever. 

Like Tori Amos sings: "Celebrate your top ten in the charts of pain."

For A Coming Extinction

W.S. Merwin

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing


I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day


The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours


When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important