Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen, <br />How long a rime since the brown people who have vanished from <br />here <br />Built fires beside you and nestled by you <br />Out of the ranging sea-wind? A hundred years, two hundred, <br />You have been dissevered from humanity <br />And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits, <br />Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses <br />Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following, <br />Screaming in the black furrow; no one <br />Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched <br />you <br />Where now my hand lies. So I have brought you <br />Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine <br />And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind. <br /> <br />I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite, <br />Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly <br />They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses, <br />Interpenetrating the silent <br />Wing-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older <br />Scars of primal fire, and the stone <br />Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry <br />A corner of the house, this also destined. <br />Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you <br />The wings of the future, for I have them. <br />How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old comrade.<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-the-rock-that-will-be-a-cornerstone-of-the-house/
