"Thanks" is the poem I'm reading to my class this morning. (I always read a poem at the beginning of every class I teach.)  My thought on poetry is that it either hits you in the heart or doesn't. Poems don't need intellectual understanding – though that can deepen your appreciation of the poem later. The main thing is that a poem jars you out of complacency, makes you pay attention, acknowledges what you feel but can't put into words, gives you images you can't get out of your head.

This poem by W.S. Merwin is not your typical Thanksgiving poem. 

 

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

~W. S. Merwin published over twenty books of poetry, including the recent collections The Shadow of Sirius which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (2002); The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997); The Vixen (1996); and Travels (1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2004) and Dante’s Purgatorio, and numerous plays and books of prose.