A Kind of Pied Beauty*
Gerard Manley Hopkins* thanked God for “dappled things…
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)”
And I had that feeling today encountering
A blind man and his blind daughter, faces fiercely resolute
And slender canes ponderously tapping
On the downtown platform at 34th Street.
I hesitated
But their “confidence” stopped me.
Then, moments later, they arrived (with me)
On the uptown platform…(maneuvering a tricky underpass)
This time I determined to “help”.
But, a young, non-English speaker had taken over
And despite his earnest efforts….father and daughter
Proudly sauntered on….knowing where they wanted to go.
And then (and here’s the pied beauty of it all)
I landed a comfortable seat just across from a beautiful woman from 1945…
Her gorgeous, thick grey hair swept back with a barrette,
Her mink coat serenely wrapped around her…
Her hands gloved in tiny polka dots…white on a black ground…
And when I saw her matching polka dot umbrella…
I knew that, like GMH, I had truly had a pied beauty experience.
*“Pied Beauty” Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)
