The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean, The blue pool in the old garden, More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific: — Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant. Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs Nor any future world-quarrel of westering And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths— Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan. Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke Into pale sea, —look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia, Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleeping Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.
El poema fue escrito entre 1942 y 1947 y publicado en 1948 en The Double Axe and Other Poems.
Imagen de portada: Sofía Cruz, de la serie Soles, 2018