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Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're
not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering. -Arthur C Clarke,
science fiction writer (1917-2008 )  (died last week)

 

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Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place 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 two 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 our 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

 

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Window Poems  (#19)

 

Peace.  May he waken

not too late from his wraths

to find his window still

clear in its wall, and the world

there.  Within things

there is peace, and at the end

of things.  It is the mind

turned away from the world

that turns against it.

The armed presidents stand

on deadly islands in the air,

overshadowing the crops.

Peace.  Let men, who cannot be brothers

to themselves, be brothers

to mulleins and daisies

that have learned to live on the earth.

Let them understand the pride

of sycamores and thrushes

that receive the light gladly, and do not

think to illuminate themselves.

Let them know that the foxes and the owls

are joyous in their lives,

and their gayety is praise to the heavens,

and they do not raven with their minds.

In the night the devourer,

and in the morning all things

find the light a comfort.

Peace. The earth turns

against all living, in the end.

And when mind has not outraged

itself against its nature,   

they die and become the place

they lived in.  Peace to the bones

that walk in the sun toward death,

for they will come to it soon enough.

Let the phoebes return in the spring

and build their nests of moss

in the porch rafters,

and in autumn let them depart.

Let the garden be planted,

and let the frost come.

Peace to the porch and the garden.

Peace to the man in the window.

 

            Wendell Berry

 

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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”   Wendell Berry

 

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Again, a poem submitted by one of us.

 

These Mountains are Moved
 
(For all the mountains.  Forgive us.)

It is here, in this place
of relief and strong breath
that rocks seep
the juice of life.
They crack a smile as we pass,
with bristly tops spitting in the wind.
 
These mountains are the ancients
having risen to cradle
the babes of now.
On their bellies they lay, upon the body skin,
their rounded shoulders and arms
shelter living seeds of time.
 
The weight and pungence of long embrace
turn hugs to chokes.  As babes will do,
we claw at these arms like a madman defied.
We scratch and maul and pierce them too.
With iron and wheel and will
these mountains are moved.

 

                 Mercedes Lee

 

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It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the

environment. -Ansel Adams, photographer (1902-1984)