in WS Merwin's THe MOON BEFORE MORNING (short short essay)
Woke to a moon before morning, about 4:00 AM, a full face in my window...returned to sleep, and woke again at 5:30 AM. Read W.S. Merwin's poems to start the day. Noted the mention of plovers as friend Penguin published author, Kristin Bair O'Keefe has her second novel taking place where plovers are endangered, on Newburyport and Plum Island, which has caused a stir among plover lovers in in New England!
I note that WS Merwin, who is very eco-concerned about disappearing species, writes about the plover and other birds in his poems in this last volume.
April 2014 publication: The Moon Before Morning.
Homecoming
"...and I looked up to the clear sky/and saw the new moon and at that/moment from behind me a band/of dark birds and then another/after it flying in silence/long curving wings hardly moving,/the plovers just in from the sea/and the flight clear from Alaska/half their weight gone to get them home/but home now arriving without/a sound as it rose to meet them."
In the poem on the dustjacket back cover and one of my favorite in the book, another mention of plovers:
Thank you for my lifelong afternoon/late in the season of no age/thank you for my windows above the rivers...thank you for friends and long echoes of them/and for those mistakes that were only mine/for the homesickness that guides the young plovers/from somewhere they loved before/they woke into it to another place/they loved before they ever saw it/thank you for the whole body and hand and eye/thank you for sights and moments known only to me who will not see them again except in my mind's eye where they have not changed/thank you for showing me the morning star..."
There are poems in this book by Merwin in which the black bird , geese, finches, jays, swallows, crows, sparrows, gulls the blue heron, the cuckoo, a dove's wing and simply "birds" appear, and the thrush's perfect song in morning. One thinks of Poe's raven; Keats, his nightingale; Tennyson, his eagle and so on...the birds of a feather gather. Singers of song, poets of the skies, the clouds, the trees, the air...feathers fall down.
I note that WS Merwin, who is very eco-concerned about disappearing species, writes about the plover and other birds in his poems in this last volume.
April 2014 publication: The Moon Before Morning.
Homecoming
"...and I looked up to the clear sky/and saw the new moon and at that/moment from behind me a band/of dark birds and then another/after it flying in silence/long curving wings hardly moving,/the plovers just in from the sea/and the flight clear from Alaska/half their weight gone to get them home/but home now arriving without/a sound as it rose to meet them."
In the poem on the dustjacket back cover and one of my favorite in the book, another mention of plovers:
Thank you for my lifelong afternoon/late in the season of no age/thank you for my windows above the rivers...thank you for friends and long echoes of them/and for those mistakes that were only mine/for the homesickness that guides the young plovers/from somewhere they loved before/they woke into it to another place/they loved before they ever saw it/thank you for the whole body and hand and eye/thank you for sights and moments known only to me who will not see them again except in my mind's eye where they have not changed/thank you for showing me the morning star..."
There are poems in this book by Merwin in which the black bird , geese, finches, jays, swallows, crows, sparrows, gulls the blue heron, the cuckoo, a dove's wing and simply "birds" appear, and the thrush's perfect song in morning. One thinks of Poe's raven; Keats, his nightingale; Tennyson, his eagle and so on...the birds of a feather gather. Singers of song, poets of the skies, the clouds, the trees, the air...feathers fall down.
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| Palm "(hand" holding birds and the Moon Before Morning |
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| The Moon Before Morning... |
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