Summer Holiday

By Robinson Jeffers

When the sun shouts and people abound

One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of

    bronze

And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;

Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-

    ered-up cities

Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.

Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains

    will cure them,

Then nothing will remain of the iron age

And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem

Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass

In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the

    mountain…