The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean, The blue pool in the old garden, More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific– Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant. Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs Nor any future world-quarrel of westering And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths– Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan. Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke Into pale sea–look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. When all that story’s finished, what’s the news? In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
An eagle’s nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the precipice-footed ridges Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress. The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated with a son of hers. When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt. The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of eighty-five raged on these ridges, She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate scorched meat. The world has changed in her time; Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men’s hopes and thoughts and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged, Their powers and their follies have become fantastic, The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him, And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and is never tired; dreams the same dreams, And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats of these living mountains. It is good for man To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur’s way Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
ered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the
mountain...
And God held in his hand A small globe. Look he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows: a bright Serpent, A river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. many People Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said.
roundhousepoetrycircle 