Lately, I've been "pushing string" a whole lot, and that never ends well. In fact, it doesn't end--it's both frustrating and pointless. There are a lot of things I can fix, that I can have a positive impact on, or redirect, but there are even more situations that I have no control over. Global issues, national issues, the weather-- myriad irritations or things that cause justifiable distress, but that I must, must, leave up to God.
In other words, pray hard, work harder, and keep moving.
That said, "stick season" brings about a lot of introspection for me. Maybe it's the stripped trees, the clumps of early snow stuck to curbs, the brown leaves mixing with errant bits of dropped paper all nestling under shrubbery. It could be the flat greyness of the sky that seems just a gradation of the color of the landscape and the pavement. No wonder I love the twinkle of Christmas lights in trees, or the sudden pop of color of a partly-hidden berry on a bush or a leftover dusky red crabapple in the higher branches of a tree.
So here we go with Frost again. This poem has been on my mind a lot, so I thought I'd share it with you. Have a good Sunday,
C
Good-by and Keep Cold
This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call
I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an ax—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
Robert Frost, "Good-by and Keep Cold" from New Hampshire. Copyright © 1923 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Public Domain.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thanks for stopping by!