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Saturday, August 16, 2014

Summer Holiday / Robinson Jeffers


Summer Holiday

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 towered-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 . . .

~~
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
from The Roan Stallion, Tamar, and other poems, 1925

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Robinson Jeffers biography

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