W.S. Merwin, 1927-2019

Photo by Tom Sewell

W.S. Merwin passed away in Maui in 2019 at age 91. A native New Yorker, he moved to Hawaii in 1976, when he was 48, and lived on a former pineapple plantation, which his wife and he transformed in an 19-acre botanical garden, with 2,740 palms from around the world, some of which they helped save from extinction. In 2010, Merwin was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Merwin wrote about strawberries, apricots, valleys, tidal lagoons, the rain and the sea—a sea which remembered all of its waves, and of waves that were always a sky made of water. That’s from Merwin's poem, “Coming to the Morning,” which appears in his 1987 collection, The Rain in the Trees, but you can read it on the Merwin Conservancy’s site, an arts and ecology organization based in his former home, which posts a semi-regular rotation of his poems.

When Merwin died, the conservancy published an outpouring of remembrances about him. But because poems and memories are not all that matter in our living world, it also posts entries about palms.