ROBINSON JEFFERS # 2

Poem for Today - July 7, 2014

CARMEL  POINT

The extraordinary patience  of things!
This beautiful house defaced with a crop of suburban                                 houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it.
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but tow or three horses pasturing.
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop                              rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine                            beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs out cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become                            confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

© Robinson Jeffers,

in Selected Poems,

A Vintage Book

Page 102