A Poem for Your Monday

 

Soon we take our seats around the table in order to say, “Thank you.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins shows us how.

 

                              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 all trades, 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