Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, <br />they have had what they wanted, <br />No hard gifts; the unhappy <br />Linger a space, but pain is a thing that is glad to be forgotten; <br />but one who has given <br />His heart to a cause or a country, <br />His ghost may spaniel it a while, disconsolate to watch it. I was <br />wondering how long the spirit <br />That sheds this verse will remain <br />When the nostrils are nipped, when the brain rots in its vault <br />or bubbles in the violence of fire <br />To be ash in metal. I was thinking <br />Some stalks of the wood whose roots I married to the earth of <br />this place will stand five centuries; <br />I held the roots in my hand, <br />The stems of the trees between two fingers: how many remote <br />generations of women <br />Will drink joy from men's loins, <br />And dragged from between the thighs of what mothers will <br />giggle at my ghost when it curses the axemen, <br />Gray impotent voice on the sea-wind, <br />When the last trunk falls? The women's abundance will have <br />built roofs over all this foreland; <br />Will have buried the rock foundations <br />I laid here: the women's exuberance will canker and fail in its <br />time and like clouds the houses <br />Unframe, the granite of the prime <br />Stand from the heaps: come storm and wash clean: the plaster <br />is all run to the sea and the steel <br />All rusted; the foreland resumes <br />The form we loved when we saw it. Though one at the end of <br />the age and far off from this place <br />Should meet my presence in a poem, <br />The ghost would not care but be here, long sunset shadow in the <br />seams of the granite, and forgotten <br />The flesh, a spirit for the stone.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/post-mortem-11/
