Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, June 21st, the first

official day of summer. And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Robinson

Jeffers, who is born in Pennsylvania in 1887, that spent most of his life in Carmel, California, where he moved with his newlywed bride in 1913.

And he exclusively wrote poetry at that time. He had training in many academic pursuits, academic degrees.

He studied literature, medicine, forestry, and classical languages.

But once he moved to Carmel, he dedicated himself

to writing poetry exclusively. And he died in Carmel by the Sea in 1962, leaving behind a vast

collection of poetry whose emphasis was on ecology.

He was known as an eco-poet, and so he wrote a lot about nature

in the interaction of humanity within the natural world.

And in honor of the first day of summer and of Robinson Jeffers,

I'm going to read for you an eco-poetic poem called

Carmel Point, and this is how it goes. 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.

In one sense, this is a relatively straightforward poem, a poem that elevates nature over

humanity's intrusion into nature. The narrator describes a pristine cliff in Carmel, California that has been overrun with the

building of suburban houses. And so in that sense, the poem begins with a lament because you can hear

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