Excerpts of THE VALLEY by Philip Levine

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have
no word for it.

Remember the small boats that bobbed out as
the waves rode in, and the mean who carved a living
from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing.
Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the
mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind,
catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

The sea has been used as a symbol of different things in literature. This poem by the renowned American poet, Philip Levine (1928-2015) is a call to humanity to remember what is normally out of our sight and out of our mind. Here, the ocean is veiled by the valley, the latter standing for our preoccupations with what is immediately before us. “We worship the mountains” the poem says, though nothing lasts, not even the mighty mountains which will eventually “dissolve in dust.” Meanwhile, the poet says, we continue to ignore the ocean even though it is something so massive, so powerful, “the mountains have no word for it.” Written in 2011 shortly after the Environmental Movement was underway and progressing, this poem is a wake-up call for humanity to rise from our slumber (our valley) and to treat all of nature with equal respect and devotion.