Autumn morning with rain

Yesterday I finished the work on a long judging stint. I celebrated by taking a nap, and when I woke, I sat up in bed and wrote a poem. It felt like magic. And even a morning of autumn rain and "Goldengrove unleaving" can feel like the first day of summer. "Nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things..." I'm in a Hopkins sort of mood, it seems.

Or perhaps it is a Yeats mood of tragic joy, alive in a world where "irrational streams of blood are staining earth." Yet from the darkness springs again "The workman, noble, and the saint, and all things run / On that unfashionable gyre again."

Skimming around the web a few moments ago, I was struck all over again by old, simple truths--that we rarely know what matters, that we mistake straw for gold, that we could be better to one another.  Have I lived this long only to know what a child learns, navigating the world? I feel like a child, eager to play with paint or to push words around on a scrap of paper. So let me go. I will make something.