“The heavens declare the glory of
God;
The skies proclaim the work of His
hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
Night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the
earth,
Their words to the ends of the
world.”
Psalm 19:1-4
Once I was a mean Freshman English
teacher who made her students memorize poetry.
One of the poets I pushed the most was Gerard Manley Hopkins, a nineteenth-century
Jesuit priest. His poetry reveals his intense love for nature, obviously
inspired by his ravenous hunger for God, and is characterized by a delightfully
unique and highly innovative structure.
I love his subtlety: he could fashion a bunch of words into an
intricately stylized sonnet without letting his readers ever know he had
accomplished such a literary feat until one decided to take it apart and
analyze its meter. That, to me, is true
humility! It’s like an opera diva who is totally contented to sing in her
shower. To express his feelings about the pervasiveness of God’s glory, he used
words like “bleared,” “smeared,” “oozed,” and “smudged”—oddly ordinary,
obliquely poetic, and some might even call too earthy or vulgar. To me they were poignantly aromatic, spicy,
tantalizing, and just plain delicious.
He
couldn’t help it! He was eaten up with revealing God’s handiwork. I really get
that because since I was just a little girl, I have loved reading and writing
poetry. I am magnetically drawn to the
Psalms and next to Jesus, I love David above all other men in the Bible.
When
earth turns a page and suddenly changes chapters, I can hardly contain
myself. I dream about poetry and wake up
spouting rhythm and rhyme. I can hardly
finish brushing my teeth before I grab the nearest scrap of paper and start
scribbling.
Today is October 1, and
it happened again. On my porch, drinking my coffee—
here came a parade of words to invade
my devotional time. Literarily, they are nothing special; I have written dozens
of others that I had rather share with you.
But I was so glad to remember that I am a poet who, like Hopkins and
David, can’t help myself. It’s been a
long, hot, dry spell; I had begun to think I had lost the feel. So, I offer you with Hopkinesque humility, my
verses welcoming autumn.
The sun has
tinted the shadowed sky blue;
Acorns
clatter down tin roofs.
There’s no
place else I’d rather be
In this
world but right here, in truth.
A
hummingbird sips as the train rumbles by;
Summer’s
pink blossoms hang on.
My inner man
is bathed in the Word
That I
feasted upon at dawn.
A squirrel
hides his treasures for winter;
In the
pasture black mama cow bellows.
Autumn
silently surrounds me
Preparing
its oranges and yellows.
Stifling August
is finally a memory;
Blustery
gales yet to come.
While
birdsong and blanket on the porch in October
Threaten to
make me a bum!
Hopkins
was right. God’s glory oozes out, smears
itself everywhere. God is so stuffed with
Glory that it constantly seeps out of all creation: out of the autumn trees in the
gypsy adornment of fiery foliage; out of the birds in pied feathers and lilting
song; out of the bare, brown dirt in pink and purple petals; out of me in
poetry; out of you in music.
