A poem shows up in my feed, posted ten years ago in a writer’s blog,
But the poem is much older than that.
I’m triggered.
I hear it in 1963
In the fifth grade classroom of a low-budget Christian school,
In Bellevue Washington, before Microsoft and all that,
Read to us by Mr. Jolley, our teacher,
A youngish man with a son suffering from something incurable.
OK, I’ll tell you: rheumatoid arthritis.
“Glory be to God for dappled things,” he reads with emotion that seems improbable, even to my young mind.
And now, in my old mind, I’m pretty sure it was right around that time;
On a sun-dappled, blood-spattered Dallas afternoon,
Our president was shot down.
Mr. Jolley drove the school bus,
Doing double duty to make some extra bucks.
And he played football with us at recess,
Which sometimes went on for hours, poetry be damned.
Seriously.
Christian school stuff, I guess.
Or maybe Mr. Jolley just wanted to forget about his little boy’s pain for a while.
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled 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.
Beautiful
Thank you .