Gershom

Reading Verlyn Klinkenborg, Robinson Jeffers, and certain other inhabitants of Brigitte’s poetry folders, I sometimes wonder whether that persistent inner feeling expressed in Exodus 2:22 (link), “I have been a stranger in a strange land,” refers to what we call civilization where only token remnants of the natural world survive, rather than (as I sometimes feel, failing to make the proper distinctions) the whole order of earthly existence. Nowhere in this vast, hardened lava flow of urbanization do we see—

…the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;

The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock

With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills

The red-shafted woodpecker flying,

A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,

Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.

This from Robinson Jeffers “The Broken Balance, Part III,” quoted more fully on Laudator Temporis Acti, on November 30, 2010 (link)—a valued gift.