Dappled...

Hideous weather today - high winds and heavy rain - so any thought of hay-meadow survey was abandoned. I tried to take some photographs of garden flowers being thrashed to and fro by the breeze but didn't really like any of them. Just before sunset this beautiful dappled sky appeared - I just wish I'd been somewhere with a more photogenic foreground. And although the weather felt like November you can tell its summer by the single swift flying south - perhaps it thinks it ought to be returning home already!!

And even though I am not a believer, I felt this poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins seemed particularly appropriate:

"Pied Beauty"

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 all trades, 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.