Welcome to April’s Poem of the Month!
First, my apologies for sending out this month’s poem almost half-way through April! Life, as we all know, can get hectic and busy. In addition to Spring bursting its way onto the stage here in Seattle, this month has already seen a major project at work that has been challenging in both its scope and timeline. My family has a whole litany of birthdays and anniversaries this month (including my daughter’s birthday tomorrow and my own in a few weeks), I have a major kitchen remodel underway, and I just completed the redesigned our www.fortheloveofport.com website. To top it off, I am having to juggle getting my car’s rear window repaired after someone decided that they’d see how much change might be in the center console (I think they made off with about $0.42, an emergency car kit and little else). I actually laughed that someone went through all that effort… The window and the kit are all replaceable – they are, after all, just “things” – and I found two quarters on the sidewalk this morning, so I figure I’m $0.08 ahead now.
I sincerely appreciate you letting me share one of my passions, poetry, with you all. I have long been a lover of words, of the condensing of sentiment into those well-chosen words, those perfect phrases that capture love, or fear, or remorse, or joy and leaves it hanging there, just in front of our eyes purely for our enjoyment. Selecting a poem each month is truly a labor of love for me – it is a time every month when, no matter how busy life gets, I pause to read, to reflect, to share. Maybe it’s just my way of acknowledging and celebrating those small moments of profoundness that seem so elusive for the rest of the month. Either way, thank you for your indulgence.
Yesterday, standing in the middle of my 1942 kitchen, now stripped bare to the stud walls, I started thinking about the meals that had been cooked there, the laughs, the lives that passed through this space. I may have begun to feel a little sense regret at changing such a space, but it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t the cabinets or the tile countertops or the aging linoleum that gave this space is reverence. Kitchens and buildings and places constantly change, but it is precisely those laughs, those lives and those memories that endow those spaces with their meaning.
As if to drive the point home once and for all, as I turned from the scene, I noticed, written by my daughter’s finger in the fine layer of plaster dust that had settled on the sideboard, the words “I love you Dad”.
Wishing you “pristine beauty” in the grain of your own personal granite…
Robinson Jeffers
(1887 – 1962)
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban 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.
