Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

This poem is (in Hopkin’s own words) “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the [River] Elwy.”

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
~Amy Lowell from “September 1918”

There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing.

Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience).
~Kathleen Mulhern from “A Christ Sighting” from Dry Bones

Am I the only one who awoke this morning praying
today might be a day of healing between peoples,
when the barbarous becomes beautiful
and we seek to become balanced rather than broken?

A day of
no drone missiles being launched,
no threats of annihilation and winner takes all,
no one gunned down in the street,
no vehicles used as weapons,
no harsh and angry words spoken,
no child misused,
no one sold into slavery,
no one overdosing, abandoned,
homeless and starving.

Am I the only one who awakes and only seeks
to watch the clouds
to praise the heavens
to see the leaves turn color
to take out this one day and taste it
and find that it is good,
then put it away for self-keeping
to share when and if I find someone else
as hungry for grace and mercy as I am,

so as to balance myself somehow
in the beauty of this world while
teetering on its brokenness?

I am not the only one.
I know I am not…