Guess Why There Is Silence in Heaven

Merwin could be pretty smug.
His calm has a righteous streak.
He wrote the natural world,

And the unnatural world
Wasn’t it. Old sense of sin,
Of the division between

What was as it was and what
Was as mankind messed it up—
Not that his lines spelled it out

As baldly as a sermon.
He knew how to lead gently,
To list the ingredients

In their polysyllabic
Horror, to invite your thoughts.