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.