I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
Witness by W.S. Merwin
The Essential W. S. Merwin, 2017, The Rain in the Trees, 1987
“My partner, Terry Tempest Williams, and I just spent two weeks at his home right before Christmas. I’ve always loved this poem but now I feel like I have a new understanding of it because of the idea of subject versus object, enchantment versus disenchantment. When he writes, ‘I want to tell you what the forests were like,’ he is talking about when the trees were full of spirits, when the forests were enchanted. That’s why he has to speak in a forgotten language and that’s the language that Justine and I talked about trying to rediscover today.”
Brooke Williams is a naturalist and environmental writer
and author of Encountering Dragonfly:
Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment
