Flying Crooked???

Cabbage White

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has- who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
(Robert Graves)

I heard this poem for the first time on the radio many years ago when I was in my car and it struck a chord immediately.  So when I got home, I looked it up and subsequently used it as an opening to a sermon.  You see, to me, there is a message in it!  Most of the poem is about how useless the Cabbage White is because it just can’t fly straight – it just flies randomly in all directions with no direction at all.  It even compares it very unfavourably with the swift which has such amazing aerobatic skills.

But then right at the end it turns it around and says that far from being useless, it has a real gift for ‘flying crooked’ :)!  You see, its all about how you look at it – which led me to question, how do we look at ourselves?  You may not be able to ride a bike like Bradley Wiggins, or wield a tennis racket like Roger Federer; you may not be a Mother Theresa or a Martin Luther King – the Cabbage White is not a Swift……but he has his own gifts and strengths, as do we all!  Its all about how we see ourselves :)!

Flying crooked!

Both pictures were taken on a recent walk – full blog to follow.  The second one was of course modified in Photoshop :)!

Thanks for stopping by and reading the ramblings of The Dorset Rambler.

Your friend
The Dorset Rambler

All photographs on this blog are the copyright of The Dorset Rambler and may not be used without permission.