Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins : Poem In Your Post

                                                                                                                                                                  First, a glorious poem that both the late, great Maxine Kumin and I learned by heart:

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 trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

                                            - Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Now, her lovely, modern experience and expression of it, "Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins":

“A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,”

Untermeyer says in my yellowed

college omnibus of modern poets,

perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?

Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.

Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked

begins to show its margins. Speeding back

down the interstate into my own hills

I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully

and softened by millennia into pillows.

The priest’s sprung metronome tick-tocks,

repeating how old winter is. It asks

each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,

what is all this juice and all this joy?

We lost a fine, fine poet yesterday, one whose craft appeared effortless and whose keen-eyed response to daily life helps us honor and even transcend it.

May all be well for you always, wherever you are, Ms. Maxine,
L

p.s.  To learn more about her and her work try: her website, her thorough and respectful NY Times obituary, and her page on the Poetry Foundation's website.