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
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
Nor any future world-quarrel of
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
Into pale sea—look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
Robinson Jeffers
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