A golden shovel poem is kind of like a parlor game or a puzzle.
You take one line from a poem and use each word in that line as the end words for each line in a new poem.
In this case, my poetry sister Kelly chose Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, which is so exquisite it feels almost wrong to deconstruct it. But deconstruct it we did!!
I used the very first line as my Golden Shovel and I’ll admit I cheated a bit, making the first word my title instead of my first end word. I hope Gerard Manley would understand. Anyway, here goes. Enjoy!
Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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 áll trádes, 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.
Glory, by Liz Garton Scanlon
To be a girl with a pony in the late yellow light, to be
witness to cowbirds and huge round clocks of hay, to
be a girl with a barebacked pony, to be witness to God –
no less than God is this! – this mane, this hill, this whisper for
her to Giddy up, Glory, Giddy up, into today all dappled.
What glory, to be a girl with so many splendored things.
And here are my Poetry Sisters’ poems….
