A War Poem from W.S. Merwin
As an introduction, W. S. Merwin is one of the most accomplished poets of our time. Merwin wrote eleven books of poetry. His work in The Carrier of Ladders won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
He translated thirteen books of poetry (from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin). His work, Selected Translations 1948 - 1968, won him the PEN Translation Prize for 1968.
In 1974, Merwin was awarded the distinguished Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets.
Besides poetry, Merwin wrote four books of prose.
I am fond of a few poems with themes on war from his 1992 collection of poetry titled Travels, published by Knopf. In regards to this poem, The Wars in New Jersey, I like to think it speaks so well about how I feel right now; and maybe how you feel right now. I appreciate his insight on how war affects the people of the country, the ones who have no voice in regards to who we go to war with, but the ones who have to pay for it with our own earnings. I also like the closing stanza. Merwin seems to suggest that we are truly an apathetic animal-- we seem to see the effects of war yet pretend it's good and worthwhile, as if it's peacetime, as if we know the purpose of being there.
The Wars in New Jersey
This is the way we were all brought up now
we imagine and so we all tell
of the same place by saying nothing about it
nobody is ever walking on those black
battlefields and never have we set foot there
awake nor could we find our way across
the unmemorized streams and charred flats
that we roll through canned in a dream of steel
but the campaigns as we know we know
were planned and are still carried out for our sake
with our earnings and so near to us
who sail forward holding up our papers before us
while the towers rising from the ruins and the ruins
the acres of wrecked wheels the sinking
carries the single limbs yet hanging
from the light fall away as we pass
in whose name it is being accomplished
all in a silence that we are a part of
that includes the casualties the names
the leaves and waters from the beginning
everything that ever lived there
the arguments for each offensive the reasons
and the present racing untouchable
foreground its gray air stitched with wires its lace
of bridges and its piled horizons flickering
between tanks and girders a silence
reaching far out of sight to regions half legend
where the same wars are burning now for us
about which we have just been reading something
when we look out and think no one is there
a silence from which we emerge onto the old
platfrom only a few minutes late
as though it were another day
in peacetime and we knew why we were there
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