Bright Wings

Another morning blip -- this is my favorite image from an exploratory wander in the back garden, enjoying all the bees on the evergreen huckleberry blossoms and trying not to step on the slugs doing their clean-up chores.

The backlit Japanese maple seeds caught my eye, and brought to mind a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1845-1889) that I have loved for years.

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 breast and with ah! bright wings.