I will have shepherds for my philosophers, Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll … - Robinson Jeffers

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy and the dogs that talk revolution, drunk with talk, liars and believers. I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies," said the gamey black-maned wild boar tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

Ascent To The Sierras

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Poems by Robinson Jeffers : 8 / 140 « prev. poem next poem »
Ascent To The Sierras

Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising
Begins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers
to little humps and
barrows, low aimless ridges,
A sudden violence of rock crowns them. The crowded
orchards end, they
have come to a stone knife;
The farms are finished; the sudden foot of the
slerra. Hill over hill,
snow-ridge beyond mountain gather
The blue air of their height about them.

Here at the foot of the pass
The fierce clans of the mountain you'd think for
thousands of years,
Men with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles' hunger,
Have gathered among these rocks at the dead hour
Of the morning star and the stars waning
To raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven
Their scared booty to the highlands, the tossing horns
And glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have
looked back
Standing above these rock-heads to bark laughter
At the burning granaries and the farms and the town
That sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies...
lighting the dead...
It is not true: from this land
The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace
with the valleys; no
blood in the sod; there is no old sword
Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are
all one people, their
homes never knew harrying;
The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless
as deer. Oh, fortunate
earth; you must find someone
To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds
of the future,
against the wolf in men's hearts?

Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars — Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence:
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it,
inexhaustible treasure.