Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses
How beautiful when we first beheld it
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. 
Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from. 

- Robinson Jeffers

…poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by. This excludes much of the circumstance of modern life, especially in the cities. Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.   - R. Jeffers