Once upon a time I owned many volumes of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
Bits and pieces of his work can be found on the web. I thought I'd send
one since we seem to be in a mood for poetry. The cosmology expressed in
"The Great Explosion" may or may not be fashionable. Still, this piece
speaks to me.
Al Winslow
USA
-----------------
The Great Explosion
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies, dust clouds
and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one harbor, they
stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no way to
express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each other into
all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae like
charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling
fireblast that we were born from.
But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the whole
universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back and forth,
live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty. We see it
above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's Florence,
no anthropoid God
Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care and will never
cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the tide-stream
stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to meet the sea.
These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not --of
faceless violence, the root of all things.
--Robinson Jeffers
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