When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
ered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the
mountain ...
From The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Three Volumes, edited by Tim Hunt. Used with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. Copyright © 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Further reproduction of this material in any form requires the written permission of the publishers.