Ever since I edited my high school poetry magazine, I've been a fan of W. S. Merwin, both as a poet and as a translator of poetry. In honor of his selection as US Poet Laureate, here is one of my favorites â Separation by W. S. Merwin:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
More like this
A one line poem by W S Merwin.
Elegy
Who would I show it to
The intensity of sorrow made more poignant by economy of expression.
While I'm hoping to find the time to write about Norman Podhoretz's question "Why Are Jews Liberals?" I don't think, unlike Podhoretz, that the fundamental reason is repulsion towards the Christian theopolitical right.
I find it funny, somehow, that I learned it's National Poetry Month by reading ScienceBlogs. 'The web's largest conversation about science' seems a strange place to find contributions to a celebration of poetry, but maybe it's not.
I often think of this stanza from "Now and Again":
When you consider how learning happens
You would think once might be enough.
You would suppose such pain would become knowledge
And such knowledge would be wisdom
And such wisdom would stay with us.
We're all slow to wise up. But the creationists are stones. No matter the many embarrassments they suffer, they cannot stop pretending to know the life sciences better than the life scientists do.