WHEN THE WAR IS OVER
When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again
— W.S. Merwin, from his 1967 book The Lice. Brand-new 50th Anniversary Edition available now. Poem used by permission of the publishers, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
To browse through our archive of previously posted Poems of the Week, click here.
To support the preservation of W.S. Merwin’s legacy and our efforts to preserve his home and palm forest for future generations, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Merwin Conservancy.
Featured photo, “War”, by Alan Bloom, is used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). The original photo can be found here.
