Gerard Manley Hopkins - 8 Select Poems

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shèer plòd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermilion.

Spring and Fall

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Binsey Poplars

(Felled 1879)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew -
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.





Andromeda

Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty’s equal or
Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.
Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes?—
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.





Duns Scotus' s Oxford

Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.





At the Wedding-March

God with honour hang your head,
Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
With lissome scions, sweet scions,
Out of hallowed bodies bred.

Each be other’s comfort kind:
Déep, déeper than divined,
Divine charity, dear charity,
Fast you ever, fast bind.

Then let the March tread our ears:
I to him turn with tears
Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
Déals tríumph and immortal years.





Brothers

How lovely the elder brother’s
Life all laced in the other’s,
Lóve-laced!—what once I well
Witnessed; so fortune fell.
When Shrovetide, two years gone,
Our boys’ plays brought on
Part was picked for John,
Young Jóhn: then fear, then joy
Ran revel in the elder boy.
Their night was come now; all
Our company thronged the hall;
Henry, by the wall,
Beckoned me beside him:
I came where called, and eyed him
By meanwhiles; making my play
Turn most on tender byplay.
For, wrung all on love’s rack,
My lad, and lost in Jack,
Smiled, blushed, and bit his lip;
Or drove, with a diver’s dip,
Clutched hands down through clasped knees—
Truth’s tokens tricks like these,
Old telltales, with what stress
He hung on the imp’s success.
Now the other was bráss-bóld:
Hé had no work to hold
His heart up at the strain;
Nay, roguish ran the vein.
Two tedious acts were past;
Jack’s call and cue at last;
When Henry, heart-forsook,
Dropped eyes and dared not look.
Eh, how áll rúng!
Young dog, he did give tongue!
But Harry—in his hands he has flung
His tear-tricked cheeks of flame
For fond love and for shame.
Ah Nature, framed in fault,
There ’s comfort then, there ’s salt;
Nature, bad, base, and blind,
Dearly thou canst be kind;
There dearly thén, deárly,
I’ll cry thou canst be kind.

Gerard Manley Hopkins - "Pied Beauty," Biography, Background & Structure

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.


All things counter, original, spáre, strange;

Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Práise hím.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918







The Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gerard-manley-hopkins

"Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I."

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

Biography

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.

About The Poem

"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Background

In the poem, the narrator praises God for the variety of "dappled things" in nature, such as cattle, trout and finches. He also describes how falling chestnuts resemble coals bursting in a fire, because of the way in which the chestnuts' reddish-brown meat is exposed when the shells break against the ground. The narrator then moves to an image of the landscape which has been "plotted and pieced" into fields (like quilt squares) by agriculture. At the end of the poem, the narrator emphasizes that God's beauty is "past change", and advises readers to "Praise him".

This ending is gently ironic and beautifully surprising: the entire poem has been about variety, and then God's attribute of immutability is praised in contrast. By juxtaposing God's changelessness with the vicissitude of His creation, His separation from creation is emphasized, as is His vast creativity.

This turn or volta also serves to highlight the poet's skill at uniting apparent opposites by means of form and content: the meter is Hopkins's own sprung rhythm, and the packing-in of various alliterative syllables serves as an aural example of the visual variety Hopkins describes.

eNotes

http://www.enotes.com/pied-beauty

Background

The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is often described as an early modern poet ahead of his Victorian time. This is perhaps why, while he wrote “Pied Beauty” in 1877, in common with most of his other poetry, it was first published twenty-nine years after his death. It appeared in the first collected edition of his poems, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (1918). The poem subsequently appeared in the second complete edition of Hopkins’s poetry, published in 1930. As of 2006, “Pied Beauty” was available in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips (1986).

“Pied Beauty” is one of the first poems that Hopkins wrote in the so-called sprung rhythm that he evolved, based on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon and ancient Welsh poetry. His aim was to approximate the rhythms and style of normal speech, albeit speech infused with a religious ecstasy and enthusiasm that are characteristics of his poetry.

The poem also embodies Hopkins’s innovative use of condensed syntax and alliteration. It is written in the form of a curtal or shortened sonnet, another of Hopkins’s stylistic inventions. Thematically, the poem is a simple hymn of praise to God for the “dappled things” of creation. God is seen as being beyond change but as generating all the variety and opposites that manifest in the ever-changing world. Hopkins is best known as a nature poet and a religious poet, and “Pied Beauty” perfectly exemplifies both these aspects of his work.





Sparknotes

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/hopkins/section3.rhtml

Summary

The poem opens with an offering: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” In the next five lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric of“dappled.” He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the "brinded" (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting color on a trout. The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell; they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within. The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the“trades” and activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment.

In the final five lines, Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the characteristics of these examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now to the concept of variety and diversity that he has elaborated thus far mostly in terms of physical characteristics.The poem becomes an apology for these unconventional or “strange”things, things that might not normally be valued or thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God, which, in their multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and inspire us to “Praise Him.”

Form

This is one of Hopkins’s “curtal” (or curtailed) sonnets, in which he miniaturizes the traditional sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and shortening the six lines of the sestet to four and a half. This alteration of the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating originality and contrariness. The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem (for example, dappled, stipple, tackle, fickle, freckled, adazzle) enacts thecreative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a pleasing and coherent whole.

Commentary

This poem is a miniature or set-piece, and a kind of ritual observance. It begins and ends with variations on the mottoes of the Jesuit order (“to the greater glory of God” and “praise to God always”), which give it a traditional flavor, tempering the unorthodoxy of its appreciations. The parallelism of the beginning and end correspond to a larger symmetry within the poem: the first part (the shortened octave) begins with God and then moves to praise his creations. The last four-and-a-half lines reverse this movement, beginning with the characteristics of things in the world and then tracing them back to a final affirmation of God. The delay of the verb in this extended sentence makes this return all the more satisfying when it comes; the long and list-like predicate, which captures the multiplicity of the created world, at last yields in the penultimate line to a striking verb of creation (fathers-forth) and then leads us to acknowledge an absolute subject, God the Creator. The poem is thus a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. It expresses the theological position that the great variety in the natural world is a testimony to the perfect unity of God and the infinitude of His creative power. In the context of a Victorian age that valued uniformity, efficiency, and standardization, this theological notion takes on a tone of protest.

Why does Hopkins choose to commend “dappled things” inparticular? The first stanza would lead the reader to believe that their significance is an aesthetic one: In showing how contrasts and juxtapositions increase the richness of our surroundings, Hopkins describes variations in color and texture—of the sensory. The mention of the “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” in the fourth line, however, introduces a moral tenor to the list. Though the description is still physical, the idea of a nugget of goodness imprisoned within a hard exterior invites a consideration of essential value in a way that the speckles on a cow, for example, do not. The image transcends the physical, implying how the physical links to the spiritual and meditating on the relationship between body and soul. Lines five and six then serve to connect these musings to human life and activity. Hopkins first introduces a landscape whose characteristics derive from man’s alteration (the fields), and then includes “trades,” “gear,” “tackle,” and “trim” as diverse items that are man-made. But he then goes on to include these things, along with the preceding list, as part of God’s work.

Hopkins does not refer explicitly to human beings themselves, or to the variations that exist among them, in his catalogue of the dappled and diverse. But the next section opens with a list of qualities (“counter, original, spare, strange”) which, though they doggedly refer to “things” rather than people, cannot but be considered in moral terms as well; Hopkins’s own life, and particularly his poetry, had at the time been described in those very terms. With “fickle” and “freckled” in the eighth line, Hopkins introduces a moral and an aesthetic quality, each of which would conventionally convey a negative judgment, in order to fold even the base and theugly back into his worshipful inventory of God’s gloriously “pied”creation.

SHMOOP

http://www.shmoop.com/pied-beauty/

In A Nutshell

"Praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD from the heavens,
Praise him in the heights above."

That's not Gerard Manley Hopkins, but it sounds a little like "Pied Beauty," doesn't it? The quote comes from the Book of Psalms in the Bible. It's a "hymn to creation," just like "Pied Beauty." The Psalms inspired this genre, which makes a very simple argument: the world is great and amazing, so God must be too. Some of Hopkins's best poetry celebrates the creations of nature in all their quirky majesty. For example, check out "God's Grandeur," which you can also read about on Shmoop.

Hopkins wrote "Pied Beauty" in 1877, the same year that he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. He is known today as one of the great innovators of English poetry, and particularly for his use of "sprung rhythm." (We'll explain more about "sprung rhythm" in "Form and Meter.")

Hopkins was born in England and lived during the reign of Queen Victoria, often called the Victorian period. His poems are beloved by people of all stripes and "stipples" (pun!) who think that oddness makes the world that much more praise-worthy.

With only a few exceptions, Hopkins did not publish his poetry during his lifetime. The first collection of his work, including this poem, became available to the public in 1918, almost thirty years after his death.

Why Should I Care?

In the history of artists who praise nature, Gerard Manley Hopkins stands out from the crowd. There are two conventional approaches to appreciating nature. The first is to be so bowled over that you can't say anything at all: "Did you see that sunset!? Like…I can't…it's so….wow!" The second is to appreciate nature only insofar as it seems like a nice, organized system: "I love trees that are symmetrical and evenly spaced, waterfalls that fit perfectly on the mountainside, and even the way a snail's shell makes a perfect spiral."

Hopkins takes a different approach. He eloquently loves nature for its quirks, the way you might love someone for his or her big ears. Many writers who glorify nature try to make the world more orderly and manageable than it really is. Rather than ignoring the off-kilter parts of reality, Hopkins zooms right in on them. He would walk into your house and say something like, "Hey, I love how your picture looks a little crooked. Nice work." And you would wonder if he were kidding. But you would soon realize that, no, he is not.

Much of "Pied Beauty" focuses on spots, dots, and speckles in particular. These are the "pied" things from the title. We typically think of spots as our enemy. We have spot removers for our clothes, and when we clean a room really well we call it "spotless." For Hopkins, "spotless" would be a sad state – if it were possible. Fortunately, the word is an exaggeration – a figure of speech. For just when you think you have every last speck of dust cleaned from a room, a ray of sunlight will suddenly come down through the window, lighting up all the tiny floating specks in the air, and you'll be frozen with wonder. You might even say to yourself, "Hey, I could write a poem about this."

Summary

http://www.shmoop.com/pied-beauty/summary.html

The speaker says we should glorify God because he has given us dappled, spotted, freckled, checkered, speckled, things. (This poem says "dappled" in a lot of different ways.)

The speaker goes on to give examples. We should praise God because of the skies with two colors, like a two-colored cow. And the little reddish dots on the side of trout. And the way fallen chestnuts look like red coals in a fire. And the blended colors of the wings of a finch (a kind of bird). And landscapes divided up by humans into plots for farming. And for all the different jobs that humans do.

In short, the speaker thinks we should praise God for everything that looks a bit odd or unique, everything that looks like it doesn't quite fit in with the rest.

All these beautiful, mixed-up, ever-changing things were created or "fathered" by a God who never changes. The speaker sums up what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."





The Cummings Study Guide

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Pied.html

Type of Work

"Pied Beauty" is a lyric poem praising God for his variegated creation. The author, Gerard Manley Hopkins, called the poem a curtal sonnet, meaning a shortened or contracted sonnet. A curtal sonnet consists of eleven lines instead of the usual fourteen for the standard Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Besides being a lyric poem in the form of a curtal sonnet, "Pied Beauty" may also be classified as catalogue verse because it presents a thesis followed by a list of examples (catalogue) that support the thesis.

Composition and Publication

Hopkins completed "Pied Beauty" in 1877. The London firm of Humphrey S. Milford published it in 1918 in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Theme

The theme of the poem is this: Nature in its variety--including streaked, spotted, and multicolored skies, fields, nuts, fish, birds, and other animals--is a gift of God for which we all should be thankful. One may interpret this theme to include human beings, with their many personalities, moods, idiosyncrasies, occupations, cultures, languages, political systems, skin colors and other physical attributes, and so on.

Meter: Sprung Rhythm

The meter of "Pied Beauty" is sprung rhythm, a term coined by Hopkins to describe a metric format that permits an unlimited number of unstressed syllables in each line to accompany stressed syllables. A metric foot in sprung rhythm usually contains one to four syllables. Hopkins intended sprung rhythm to mimic the stresses occurring in ordinary English speech.

Structure

Hopkins begins and ends the poem with a call to praise God for the gifts He has given us. Between these calls, he presents two short lists and a comment about the beauty of God. The first list uses concrete and specific language (skies, the cow, trout, chestnuts, finches, and farm fields); the second list, abstract and general language (things counter, original, spare, strange, fickle, etc.). The comment notes that the beauty of God, unlike the beauty of creation, does not change. Thus, Hopkins structures the poem as follows:

1. A call to praise God for his gifts.

2. A list of gifts in specific language.

3. A list of gifts in abstract language.

4. A comment about the immutable beauty of God.

5. A call to praise God.

Rhyme

The rhyme scheme of the poem is as follows:

Lines 1-6: ABCABC

Lines 7-10: DBDC

Line 11: C

Tone

The tone is exuberant and spirited. The poem is a song of joy.

Summary of the Poem

Glory to God, the speaker says, for giving the world spotted, streaked, and multicolored things. Blue skies, for example, may display streaks of white or gray--or the colors of the sunset. In this respect, skies are like cows, which may be brown with streaks or patches of another color. And then there are the speckled trout and the fallen chestnuts with open hulls that reveal kernels with an intense color resembling the glow of burning coal. Consider also, the speaker says, the multicolored wings of the finches and the farmland with patches of green contrasting with plowed or fallow patches of brown. And what of the variety of tools and kits and equipment that dapple the workplace of men?

There are many varieties of odd and strange things in the world--some of them original, one of a kind. The qualities of these fickle things may be freckled with opposites. Swiftness may be freckled with slowness, sweetness with sourness, brightness with dimness.

But He who brings forth dappled things is not Himself dappled. He is changeless, ever the same.

Praise him.

Pied Beauty By Gerard Manley Hopkins Text and Notes Glory be to God for dappled1 things— For skies of couple-colour2 as a brinded3 cow; For rose-moles4 all in stipple5 upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;6 finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.7 All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth8 whose beauty is past change: 10 Praise him. Notes 1...dappled: Spotted, speckled, pied; multicolored. 2...couple-colour: Two colors. 3...brinded: Brindled; having a brownish yellow or gray coat with spots or streaks of a darker color. 4...rose-moles: Reddish spots on the skin. 5...stipple: Pattern of spots. 6...Fresh . . . falls: Fallen chestnuts with shells that opened. The exposed nuts resemble glowing coals. 7...trim: equipment. 8...fathers-forth: Creates, begets.

R.E. Slater - School Days (a poem)

Patterson Reunion, Kent County, Michigan, c.1950's. [Photo: R.E. Slater]

School Days

by R.E. Slater

“Walking, I am listening to a deeper way.

Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me.

Be still, they say. Watch and listen.

You are the result of the love of thousands.”

- Linda Hogan (b.1947),

North American writer

1 Back in my day (somewhere in those middle school years),

2 I greased my long blonde hair thick with Vaseline Oil,

3 finely combing it, this way or that, in dark, straight lines,

4 laying it flat around my head – not like I do now,

5 using a rough hair brush and giving it a quick “one-two!” –

6 but with a fine-toothed comb like dad’s (we had several),

7 just like how mom had taught me when I was young,

8 coo'ing in my ear her love and hopes and dreams, making

9 me beautiful (as only she could do) in her own special way.

10 When finished shaving I'd splash hot aftershave lotion on my face,

11 (using the one named Old Spice with the sailing boats on it),

12 just like dad did when I watched him in the early waking mornings,

13 as we  jostled each other for the mirror within our small bathroom –

14 him, hurrying to get ready for work (he had too many jobs I thought),

15 and me, getting ready for school, in morning's black dark; he’d have

16 hot, black coffee perking by the time my brother and I started

17 a breakfast of sunnyside eggs (or scrambled), toast and hot cereal,

18 as we stuffed paper sacks full (we we’re grown now and didn't use

19 tin lunchbuckets holding a fragile glass thermos of hot soup within).

20 Then stand in the living room watching for the school bus, but

21 briefly glimpsed below our hill from a large picture window that

22 looked down upon a five-lane thoroughfare invading our farms,

23 listening for the bus’ old screechy brakes – then quickly hurry out –

24 racing, slipping, sliding, down the driveway’s black tarred hill,

25 hoping it waited for us as we ran, but if it didn’t, well, no matter,

26 we’d catch it on t’other side – crossing all five sleepy lanes under

27 mom’s worried eye as the bus laboriously turned around, returning

28 to the school district it just had left (we had no close neighbors).

29 To our secret delight dad drove the school bus when we were younger,

30 he was business-like, watching in all directions, while we stepped up

31 into the cold dark of the empty bus listening to the blowing heaters

32 vainly trying to warm its cavernous chamber; later, dad was promoted

33 to day shift, and drove the city police car we rode in (when not on call),

34 or rode with him on parade days leading out the volunteer columns;

35 and when allowed, we’d ride the red fire trucks dad drove, then cleaned,

36 coming home, worn and tired from all-night fires, winter or summer,

37 to plow or disc early morning fields, tilling spring grains into dry soils

38 for grandpa next door - too old to farm and proud of his warrior son.

39 Climbing up, I lugged my saxophone band case - and my brother,

40 his trombone case - each of us placing our large instruments upright

41 into the hard, green plastic seats like an old friend seated beside us,

42 doing our homework, slouched, bouncing along, for the next hour

43 (the new school district was a long ways off for us country kids),

44 picking up odd-looking kids I maybe would talk to, or ignore,

45 (if she was pretty!) wishing I knew how to talk to pretty girls

46 and be cool, in my aftershave lotion and finely combed hair,

47 dressed-up for school, still adjusting to my new surroundings.

48 By now morning light had come as we entered the school campus,

49 revealing old-and-new buses dutifully lining-up behind each other,

50 disgorging acne-faced kids racing in excited - or shuffling out, bored

51 and disinterested under small talk and sighs - crowding into narrow

52 hallways alive with the echoes of steel lockers banging shut; there

53 saying “hi” to new friends racing to class (buses were always late),

54 and answering “Here!” to untested teachers taking daily attendance;

55 then methodically writing down spelling words on Friday’s pop quiz,

56 held in first hour English under the bright glare of buzzing lights,

57 making all nights day and each day the same in their echoing nights.

58 Lighting days once wet and young set amidst dewy pastures cloved,

59 glistening at the waking dawn hung upon rusted barbed wire strands,

60 grasped by a child's willing hands to climb its swaying, rotted fences,

61 or squeeze along lifted lines past the studied gazes of pastured bulls,

62 harem’d in the foggy mists of fallowing fields holding but lonely paths,

63 twining through the empty hollows and thorny brush soaking my

64 trouser legs and canvas'd tops of worn Red Ball Jets; ever watching

65 great, great grandpa's one-roomed country school looming ahead,

66 feeling the dull weight of a lunch bucket in my hand embracing 

67 youth and sky, sun and field, wind or rain; incarnate fellowships

68 to each succeeding day bourne of life and love, pain and unknowing.

69 Remembering the many lives of ancient lifetimes lived long ago,

70 of grandparents and grandcousins, great uncles and great aunts,

71 speak as living legends of forgotten stories unbound in modern books,

72 too little to understand an old inheritance’s ancient past dimming, then

73 lost, gravestone by gravestone, death by death, breathing last airs, till

74 none were left, and all was gone, and none could tell what once was heard,

75 in the warming springs of risen dawns, or on red harvest moons hung

76 roundish and wise in dusky sublimity over chilled and frosted hillsides,

77 silently spelling winter’s coming pall upon all browning fields left dying;

78 felt in sunset’s autumn glow and plow, fall hunt and reap; each breathing

79 distant lores of muscular shadows held on a school day’s start, enfolding

80 like liquid flowing membranes over dis-separate journeys melding close.

81 Enfolding being and becoming, entangling each day onto the next,

82 melding each life like the falling rain into the pores of open souls,

83 blending, slaking, thirsty for the dry grounds of our empty being,

84 singularly outpoured, soaking in every experience, and all tales of

85 uncharted days indetermined, roaming everywhere and nowhere,

86 bending backwards, forwards, forthwards, sidewards, timewards,

87 knowing no past but having every past, no future but every future,

88 each determining the other binding all present presents as one,

89 incarnate fellowships to time and being, to immemorable memory

90 of life lived inscrutably on the edges of what was once and now is.

        

R.E. Slater

April 13, 2012 (Friday the 13th)

revised May 7 (Erica’s BD); Oct 13, 2012;

July 13, 2014; Dec 11, 2017

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"Upon a starry heavens, silent the stars pass by and I with them..."   -R.E. Slater

My daughter and her friends, Lake Michigan Shoreline | Photo by R.E. Slater