Wet And Wildness Poem by gershon hepner

What would the world be once bereft
of wet and wildness, ? Hopkins asked.
The answer is: it would be left
without the beauty that God tasked
both Man and Woman, androgyne,
to multiply when He declared
that they should conquer earth. “It’s Mine, ”
He meant, but wished it to be shared
with mankind only if they’d treat
it with the great love it deserved,
no less a treasure at their feet
than that one which First Man preferred,
his Woman for whom he would rape
earth’s wet and wildness to impress
her in a dry, tamed cityscape
that virilized him with success,
For First Woman, side-created,
First Man would neglect the earth
till wet and wildness both abated,
like Woman’s after her sons’ birth.

Written after my daughter-in-law Karin’s delivery by Caesarian section of my fourth son and iInspired by Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “Inversnaid, ” poem that I quote in my chapter “Covering Up, ” in my forthcoming book Legal Friction p.271, n.34) :

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In cop and comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sit over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wt;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

3/6/09