Three Poems for a Time of Hope – The Marginalian

If you want to make friends with time – which is how you become friends with life – turn to stone.

Climb the mountain and listen to the conversation between eons written on each line of rock.

Walk the beach and brush your fingers on the golden dust that was once a mountain.

Pick up a perfectly round stone and feel its mute assurance that time can grind even the heaviest stone, smooth even the sharpest edge.

Rising forty feet above the rocks of Carmel is the great poem of gravity and granite Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), the poet laureate of the creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

Ten years before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and assumed that the realist was the foundation stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build the Tor House and the Hawk Tower. Since this rocky planet was not destroyed by the first world war, he began to make “love stone.”

Seeing stonemasons as “vanquished opponents who never forget” and poets as mental stonemasons, he continued to pull large blocks of granite from the beach, carrying time itself, taking its twelve consolations in his dying hands, writing about what touches him and what has touched him.

OH, BELOVED ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed all night in the roadless canyon of Ventana Creek, above the east fork.
Rock walls and mountains hung forest over our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, towering and slender Santa Lucian firs overlooking the cataracts
From slide-rock to star-colored hills.

We slept on a blanket and lit a small fire to keep warm.
At midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cool darkness; I put a bunch of dead leaves
At the ends of the embers, fold the dry sticks and lay down again. A renewed flame
He lit up the face of my sleeping son and his friend, and the straight face of the great canyon wall
Across the stream. The bright leaves above danced in the air of fire, the trees were visible: it was a wall of rocks
That caught my eye and mind. Nothing unusual: a light gray diorite with two or three slanting layers on it,
Polished smooth by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern or lichen, pure bare rock … as if I were
Seeing the rock for the first time. As if seeing from a place lit by a flame I enter a real place and body
And a living rock. Nothing unusual… I don't know
I told you how strange: silent love, deep princes and childlike loveliness: this fate continues
Under our circumstances. It is here on the mountain like a grave child smiling. I will die, and my boys
You will live and die, our world will continue its rapid pains of change and discovery; this year you will die,
And the wolves cry in the snow around the new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, the grave, loyal, it will not move: power.
That's what its atoms will be carrying all the mountain up: and I, many centuries ago,
Feel its deep truth with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

A generation later, another great poet who was removed from the stone of the world war tried to make sense of being human by turning into stone:

STONE
by Charles Simic

Enter the stone
That would be my way.
Let the other be a dove
Or bite with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
However inside, it should be cool and quiet
Even if a cow tramples it with its full weight,
Even if a child throws it into the river,
The stone is sinking, moving slowly, undisturbed
Down the river
Where the fish come they will knock on it
And listen.

I saw sparks coming out
When two stones are rubbed together.
So maybe it's not dark inside after all;
Maybe there is a bright moon
From somewhere, like behind a hill—
Just enough light to do outside
Strange texts, star charts
On the interior walls.

And while we are “beings shaped by the logic of the rocks of the planet,” we are also beings shaped by thousands of moments of compassion, saved again and again by the leap beyond reason that is trusting time.

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

May the waves
do not tire of its struggle
how repeatedly
forgives the Moon
daily exile
and returns to repentance
the mountains become sand
as if to say,
you can have it too
this is coming home
you have it too
this basic power
of repentance
a stone in the heart
in gold dust.