For Earth Day and National Poetry Month, here are a few lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Spring”) in celebration of wild places and the wild energy and joy of the season:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling….”
Ferncliff Forest Game Refuge and Forest Preserve is on Mt. Rutsen Road, 1.7 miles west of state Route 9 in Rhinebeck (turn down Montgomery Street, just before Northern Dutchess Hospital, bear left on Mt. Rutsen Road), and east of River Road. Heading east from the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, turn right onto River Road off Route 199 at the first traffic light, and then a left onto Mt. Rutsen Road).
