Robinson Jeffers

The Eye

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.
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