April is National Poetry Month!

[cerusee]

Stone is a great metaphor for trying to transcend mortality. I get very blithe and silly about it sometimes, and then I go walking down next to the Christian Science Monitor building in the Back Bay area of Boston, and I am stunned by the size and beauty of the building and the courtyard, and suddenly I can't laugh at stone anymore. God, I love that place. If I don't live in the country, I have to live in the city, so I can walk amid the next-best thing to mountains.


Robinson Jeffers, "To the Stone-Cutters."

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.