Tuesday Poem - from a work in progress

The electric wires are like disorderly hexagrams against the sky. No calm mountain over river, but a tangle of futures running roughly parallel before looping together on a tree or pole, falling to the ground or hanging perilously close to pedestrian heads. Western pedestrians heads. Sometimes my life feels like that – a raveled knot of humming tension or a stretched trick wire. But then I walk into a room lit-up with Nina singing, ‘Ne me quitte pas’, her voice all French heartbreak. A pink plastic lotus lantern hangs on one wire. My heart is like this. 

Catherine Bateson, May, 2013

This was written after my trip to Vietnam - Hanoi, to be more specific. I loved Vietnam - and I will return, I'm sure. 

Now that you've shared a little of that journey with me, come over to the Tuesday Poem blog by clicking here and share some other journeys.  There's a really interesting poem fragment as the hub poem this week - it's a beautifully imagined list poem by Robin Hyde, a New Zealand poet who died in 1939 and was curated by Janis Freegard. From the hub, you can read other Tuesday poems and thus push your week off to a lyrical beginning. 

Seven days to go - then off to Paris. I still can't quite believe it....I'm hoping to go back to WordPress before then as I think it's a more elegant format but I do need some good spam protection before I return there. I'll keep you posted on how all that goes!

Tuesday Poem

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                     Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have only fifteen days left before I travel to France! The to-do list seems overwhelming so it's good to have to slow down and think about poems of praise! I'm teaching two classes in Poems of Praise at the Council of Adult Education before I go, so I thought I'd offer  you a taste of one of the poems. It's so beautiful - and still so fresh.

Take some time out to praise poetry and check out the poems on the Tuesday poem hub by clicking here. Have a lyrical week - and my apologies for my absence. I've been to Vietnam - and it was wonderful.