Mountains, a moment's earth-waves rising and hollowing; the <br />earth too's an ephemerid; the stars- <br />Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their <br />summer, they spiral <br />Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives <br />long, the whole sky's <br />Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf <br />before birth, and the gulf <br />After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of <br />eternity is nothing too tiresome, <br />Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of <br />activity. <br />Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue <br />and epilogue merely <br />To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called <br />life? I fancy <br />That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, <br />a jump of the breath at that silence; <br />Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure <br />says 'Ah!' but the treasure's the essence; <br />Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he <br />gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-treasure-7/
