By FLEDA BROWN
Last Thanksgiving I read this poem at a large and wonderful Thanksgiving gathering with friends in Empire. I love the poem; it feels like a blessing for those of us who aren't inclined toward typical ones. I love its crazy speed, the way the speaker sees us as half-crazed with thanking.
I love the way Merwin begins with the intimate "Listen," so that we have to lean into the poem to hear, so that we feel the importance of what will follow. I am spellbound by the pace, the way phrases repeat, they way they build up an incantation.
I love the acknowledgement of sky, water and food as well as muggings and wars and the rich who will never change.
There's not just a "thank you," but a joyousness, a pure gratefulness, even with "nobody listening," for all that life holds. We are so bolstered by the incessant thanking that we can somehow even wave as if we're sending dear friends on their way after a great dinner together, even though the last line is "dark though it is," with no period at the end. This won't end. All this stuff won't end, including our gratefulness for being alive, in the middle of it.
W. S. Merwin has been in the middle of it for a long while. He's been writing for 50 years and has published more than 20 books of poetry and 20 books of translations. He was born in New York City, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and began writing hymns as a child. Both of Merwin's parents had grown up with hardship. His mother was an orphan who later lost her brother and her first child. His father was raised in a violent home. I sense in the poem, "Thanks," a firsthand knowledge of grief and tragedy.
Merwin moved to Hawaii in 1976 to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. He has become a rigorous meditator and a dedicated environmentalist, both having a large impact on his later work. His poems, like this one, are welcoming to everything that is. They don't turn away from or condone the awfulness, but encompass it with such gratefulness that our vision is somehow transformed.
You might want to save this poem to read at your Thanksgiving dinner. It worked for me.
Thanks
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
-- W.S. Merwin
From "Migration: New & Selected Poems" (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin.
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Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry
