Anderson, Wendell B.

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TO JEFFERS AT LAND'S ENDBy his strange, shallow river far inland where earth is only shorn, windswept wastes of sage and lava rim, bleakly remniscent of a drawn sea,I have read the poems: the “ Hurt Hawks,” and the “ — Republic ;”  have listened to the heart’s beat of “ Birth-Dues” and have been gripped down deep by the shock of those poems from Stir —For on that coast I have toiled upthe long lupined headlands blue as the sea,and felt the pulse of beauty’s tragedymock my eyes as it broke upon the black rocks and was water again.Here there is land—The shock of silent hillsbeating their blue upon the ear like wind.There are waters, shallow rivers, alkaline lakes, and tuled sloughs— where the geese call, and the Crane and Pelican are heard like voices of the terrain.Here, too, is beauty’s tragedy forever reminding the eye that we are mortal.Yet I cannot quite understand the cry of your dispair— for it is we who weep before the tragic skies,Who do not understand and are like children reaching for the moon. Too late we watch the high sun ascending to Noon, and while we wait the earth unmindful of Destiny or Fate gives birth to grass, wears distant rock to sharper lines against the sky—and the hawk unstayed by threat of death or broken wing skims ceaselessly, a scythe above the sage where rabbit and the rattler lurk, its vision accurate as a gauge.Its search beside these poems -— derision.Wendell B. Anderson

To Jeffers at Land's End

http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/wormwood/wormwood_a1961v1n4i4/wormwood_a1961v1n4i4p17.pdf

To Jeffers at Land's End

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