Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars –
Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the second of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never had dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe; as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence;
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure. 

John Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962) was an American poet best known for his work about the central California coast. He is considered an icon of the environmental movement. In his philosophy of “inhumanism,” Jeffers believed that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole. This led him to oppose U.S. participation in World War II, a stand that was controversial at the time. He influenced many 20^th century poets and naturalists. (Summarized from Wikipedia) 

This poem is included in “The Enlightened Heart,” an anthology of sacred poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell. I find the poem particularly apt for my own recent ponderings. I have a friend who has a recurrence of cancer and another who has been told he is at high risk for another stroke. To realize that all life is uncertain brings its own special kind of suffering. Is it that life is too short – or too long?

It is easy to become short-sighted and forget the “enormous repose after, enormous repose before” this flash of life on earth. The stars which seem so eternal to us are as short-lived as grass in the bigger view. Jeffers puts our view of life in perspective when he says, “to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome.…”

When we mistake the surface for the essence, we miss finding the real treasure, the great silence which underlies and supports all manifested creation. This inexhaustible treasure, the incredible depths, is there while “Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe.”