LOOK PAST DARK STORMS
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
- Robinson Jeffers (“The Bloody Sire”)
1962
We met the mayor at his home in St. Vith,
shaking hands in pigeon French – my father
returned to a modern town and a monument
at the crossroads to his endless war.
May 4, 1970
We left the SDS to burn the bricks
of VKC in a borrowed VW bus, tripped
naked in Little River before I was to graduate
to an M-16. Kent State brought the war home
five years before the last Americans
fled Saigon.
2006
Except for platitudes that don’t endure,
I know little else of war – unless battles
to run cattle in these hills instills
nature’s future before man's. What instructs
the feral hog his tusk, the coyote to persist
suburban streets? Has our dominion passed
for peace, or has progress spawned another
straining for power? Don’t grieve or cry –
look past dark storms and let them play
beneath dawn’s puzzled sky.
for Fannie, Bill and Peter
There is no easy refuge from the current War in Iraq or from the recurring chords common to Desert Storm and Viet Nam of our military miscalculations, of our political naïveté and of an aloofness that each campaign has sorely humbled. I can think of no other master of poetry who agonized more over war than Robinson Jeffers, continually turning to his template of nature for metaphor and enlightenment beyond the rhetoric of World War II.
“True wisdom,” wrote the Greek philosopher Seneca in the 1st Century, “consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.” I suspect our understanding of nature may be so cluttered by political agendas that both Jeffers and Seneca had a better view of it. For this reason, it is imperative to maintain our natural landscapes, and as Robbin succinctly concluded some years ago, no one can accomplish this more efficiently and economically than we grazers of livestock.
My dedication to Ann Sennett, Bill Symes, Jr. and Peter Forsch, cohorts escaping Los Angeles to Mendocino County for a week, is small tribute to their loyal friendship during turbulent times.