What Grows in Endings

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.

Merwin doesn't say he would despair or rage or cling. He plants. There's a clarity in that, a refusal of paralysis. To plant a tree is to say: the soil still holds. My hands still work. Something might break open here, even now, even if I won't see it. This is not hope exactly. It's the quiet grammar of attention, the grammar of showing up with a seed when everything else fails.