We received a wonderful little postcard yesterday from The Merwin Conservancy, the foundation established by the late poet W.S. Merwin.

It captures so much in just a few words.

The card reprints William’s hand-written note found late in his copy of a 1995 zen reader by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker.

Foster grew up in Hawaii, was long associated with Robert Aitken’s Honolulu Diamond Sangha, and has become a well-known and respected Zen teacher at a zen center in Massachusetts, after years of commuting between Honolulu and a zen center in the mountains of California. His dad was James Foster, who served as director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art) from 1963 to 1982.

Merwin’s note is deceptively simple.

To the Book Beetles

You need the bindings I see
Please leave me the pages

The postcard notes the binding was almost completely gone when the note was discovered.

The simple note tells us so much.

William took a simple moment–finding that bugs were eating one of his books–and turned it into a moment of poetry in this simple request directed to the book beatles.

And even while writing out this simple statement, he took the care–and the time–to immediately focus on, reread, and then edit his first version in order to make it more to his own liking.

“Just leave me the pages please,” became “Please leave me the pages.”

It’s the care that made him a great poet and a great observer of life.

On the Maui-based Merwin Conservancy:

It conserves both an extraordinary place—a lush and rare, 19-acre palm forest that two-time Pulitzer prize winning poet W.S. Merwin beckoned into being from land designated as agricultural wasteland—and it conserves the sense of wonder that brought forth both Merwin’s poetry, and his garden.