Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him 
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

W.S. Merwin, who passed away at his home in Hawaii on March 15, 2019, was one of the most highly regarded poets in the United States. In his long career, he published over fifty books, including The Carrier of Ladders and The Shadow of Sirius, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009 respectively, and Migration: New and Selected Poems, which earned him a National Book Award in 2007. He was also a prolific translator and a dedicated environmentalist. In 2010, he was appointed the 17th United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. The Washington Post once deemed him “the greatest living poet of his time.”