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| From my own Nature Notebook. |
God's Grandeur
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 breas and with ah!
bright wings.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
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| Attend, a papercut from Nikki McClure's 2019 calendar |
in McKenzie, Tennessee
Here in mid-winter let us begin
to lift our voices in the pine woods:
O sing praise to the pig
who in the season of first frost
gave his tender hams and succulent shoulders
to our appetite:praise to the hickory embers
for the sweetest smoke
a man is ever to smell
its incense a savor
of time bone deep:
praise for Colonel Wood and all his workers
in the dark hours who keep watch
in this turning of the flesh
to the delight of our taste:
praise to the sauce—vinegar, pepper, and tomato—
sprinkled for the tang of second fire:
praise we say now for mudwallow, hog grunt, and pig squeal
snorkle snout ringing bubbles of swill in the through,
each slurp a sloppy vowel of hunger,
jowl and hock, fatback and sowbelly, root dirt and pure
piggishness of sow, boar, and barrow.
-Jeff Daniel Marion
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