Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring"

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –          

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;          

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush          

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring          

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; 

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush          

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush          

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.          

What is all this juice and all this joy?          

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning 

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,          

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,          

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,          

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.       

Fools of Spring

May Day, and the bells ring out in distant Oxford, and the grass grows green on the sunny side of the house, and the blackbirds make a racket in the bracken, and we are shouting the same glad song for winter’s death with each stomp of our rubber boots.

Spring turns us all into yabbering fools, sprouting sincere, if unoriginal, poetry. And why not? Spring awakens our childlikeness. No one has ever said of a child’s first stab at a cat or the sun or their father, “Not bad, but I think it’s been done before.”

We are children, delighting in life and trying to get at its very essence, and all we have are shadow words next to its glory. Yet that should not, must not, stop us, for part of the glory we share is this urge of reproduction, the desire to create, and in creating to somehow comprehend our own origins in the freshness deep down.

Spring is not notable for its originality, but for its origin. God makes the spring come to Oxford and our island alike, this I tell my son. Woven into the patterns of the earth, spun up in its turning, spring is the recurring invitation to become the child we were born to be. 

~lg

Kingdom Field Notes: Mother Junco's Secret

Little mother junco knows a secret. The tilt of her head outside the kitchen window tells me so. She knows the place where heaven and earth meet, somewhere in the branches of a great tree. There she will build her nest, and lay her treasures to rest.

She has found a seed. The one that falls into the earth and dies. And it will be her kingdom.

She has a dark eye for the small things, little mother junco.

And how she will sing on the day of new birth, when the pale blue egg breaks open like a morning sky to welcome the sun!

Until then, she laughs at the snow, her faith the evidence of things unseen, and her secret keeps her warm.


~lg

A great change

The sap is flowing! The geese are returning! The world is shifting and a great change is about to come.

Now the dead will be shown for what they are. In the winter, all the branches look the same. But spring reveals the hidden reality.

All those who abide in the vine have sap in their veins. 

They will swell with buds and stretch to the sun.
They will not break when the tempest comes, nor wither in the heat.
They will bleed sweet water should the pruning knife wound.
The life is in the blood, and they are rooted and established in the heart of the universe.

They will not fear the change. They will clap their hands and wave their palms when the monarch of spring arrives, and their green laurels will be his crown. Their fruit will be his triumph, and when the grapes are trod they will cast their boughs before him as the wine is poured out for all the earth to drink.



~lg

morning prayer :: 1

God of warming spring, turn your face toward our open windows. We welcome your light and the brisk air of season’s turning. Melt the chill of winter’s drifts and the things that lie buried within. Shake us from slumber and wake us to life. Fill us with the joy of chickadees, the hope of sap rising, the flooding love of water rushing down and down. Whisper the vernal secrets of your kingdom come, and give us ears to hear.

~lg