What Island

What is it like to go abroad but not for vacation? What business do we have? What right-minded, haunted search for community, for family, for social justice takes us beyond our borders, domestic rooms, and familiar walls? What responsibility is there—those of us who’ve been to the two-thirds world, met the 99%, the uninsured, the impoverished—when we arrive and hear the planet’s last message: pay attention, live on me. What W. S. Merwin has done to elevate ecology to the poetic, P. K. Harmon now takes—without bravado, without exaggeration—to the source, the sun, the tropics we’ve wanted, adorned with fantasies of leisure, then ruined. But also, despite any American devastation, what we’ve loved and longed for: “how blue / and how we turned from one / another into blue—all so blue / those old beaks cutting ahead /the flapping somehow grace too // in the flight—those two into / a deeper and deeper blue and I / drifted closer and closer // to the rough and sharp until / finally the heavy air that is / coming into a lovely silence.” What island? The ultimate answer is earth.