I found you lying on my workbench
dead.... in desperate, peaceful stillness.
Then asked who listens.., why is this?
And,in my heart,no answer came.
I found you lying on my workbench
dead..... with wings in flight and open eyes.
I lifted you up, so cold, so stiff...
buried you and said a prayer.
I found you lying on my workbench
dead.... a lovely, brown and feathered bird
and once again I wondered, with regret,
If life is all we know and yet.....
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:
the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~ Gerard Manley Hopkins ~
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
~Robert Frost~
(please click on photos for close up view)
