Jair son of Manasseh went and seized the encampments
And called them the Encampments of Jair
Nobah went and seized Kenath
With its outlying villages
And called it Nobah
After himself.
(Numbers 32: 41-42)
1827
D’Entrecasteaux enters the bay
Looks it over
Leaves it with name of his ship:
“Astrolabe Bay.”
1871-1883
Baron Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay
(Tibud Maclay)
Comes and goes
Exploring
Recording the language
As a reward for hospitality
Leaves the coast with
His own name:
“Maclay Coast”
To further honor
The place where he landed
He called it “Constantine Harbour”
(Grand Duke Constantine
President of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society
Had paid for the trip.)
1878
Australian gold-prospectors
Put in at Bongu
In the good ship Dove
But leave at once
Forgetting to name the place
“Dove Harbor”
But there is a “Dove Point”
A hundred miles up the coast.
1884
Herr Finsch
Representing the Neu Guinea Kompagnie
Hoists the German flag
Over “Bismarck (naturally)
Archipelago” “Kaiser
(Of course) Wilhelmsland”
And last but not least
“Finschhafen.”
Thomas Merton, “Place Names” from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1968, 1969 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source:
The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1977)
A monk who lived in isolation for several years, and one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton was a prolific poet, religious writer, and essayist whose diversity of work has rendered a precise definition of his life and an estimation of the significance of his career difficult. Merton was a Trappist, a member of a Roman Catholic brotherhood known for its austere lifestyle and vow of . . .
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Poems by Thomas James Merton
