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Poet's Choice

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All the grave markers, all the crude headstones--

water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,

and we listen for what the waves intone.

Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,

round, unfinished, half open to the sky,

the elements--wind, rain--God's deliberate eye.

The adjective "deliberate" for God's eye has many resonances and associations, including the word's form as a verb, denoting the process of judgment by a court of law. Like the poem's formality and understatement, the word achieves authority, moral and poetic.

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