POEM BY THE BEAT FRIAR

• Poet's Page
• Pom

The Poet Is Dead - Poem by William Everson

Autoplay next video

(excerpt from Everson's memorial for Robinson Jeffers)

Snow on the headland,
The strangely beautiful
Oblique concurrence,
The strangely beautiful
Setting of death.

The great tongue
Dries in the mouth. I told you.
The voiceless throat
Cools silence. And the sea-granite eyes.
Washed the sibilant waters
That stretched lips kiss peace.

The poet is dead.

Nor will ever again hear the sea lions
Grunt in the kelp at Point Lobos.
Nor look to the south when the grunion
Run the Pacific, and the plunging
Shearwaters, insatiable,
Stun themselves in the sea.

William Everson

This slice of Everson's tribute to his model and inspiration Robinson Jeffers displays
his rich command of language and his constant  discovery of profound allusions and figures of speech in the world of nature.

Everson saw the world as a witness to  God's creativity and he was in  awe of it.

His  view of the natural world  is  haunted by the Hand of God and he refuses to ignore it or to give the power to Nature alone.

 He  finds always the Divine Hand shaping and making everything.  This is his  way of bearing witness  to the way everything that God made bears witness not to itself or to humanity but to the Divine Will that shapes us all.

It is a kind of ecstasy that shines in many of his poems and that showed clearly in his poetry readings when he toured as Brother Antoninus.

I was privileged to witness several of  those extraordinary events and I advise my readers to look  on YOUTUBE for an actual  video of one of his " readings as encounter".