An August Midnight (1901)
Thomas Hardy
I
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…
II
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl and sink.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/an-august-midnight/
What they know, I do not know, but surely they have thoughts and feelings. They are not clockwork toys. But they ARE telling us of their Grand Creator as clearly as if they spoke. After all, we know what goes in to make a clockwork toy - they do not just happen. And these are so much more than that.
Thursday morning, Captain M-B left early with Jim and friends for a Field Somewhere on detecting business. And it was a very noisy day, with the gardeners roaring away with hedge trimmers and the scaffolders clanking outside the window. We are now netted in, so the moth trap/hotel is in retirement until the scaffolding comes down.
I came huffing and puffing back from my Gym lesson with my kind and patient young physio on Thursday to find a splendid box of flowers waiting for us. They were from a sister in the congregation, and they were a comforting present because of the loss of my field service partner Jean.
The Governing Body says that we will be restarting the door to door preaching work on September 1st. After over two years away from it, doing letter witnessing, it makes me very nervous. But I will have to remember Paul's words at Acts 20:20: "I did not hold back from telling you any of the things that were profitable nor from teaching you publicly and from house to house."
Thomas Hardy
I
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…
II
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl and sink.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/an-august-midnight/
What they know, I do not know, but surely they have thoughts and feelings. They are not clockwork toys. But they ARE telling us of their Grand Creator as clearly as if they spoke. After all, we know what goes in to make a clockwork toy - they do not just happen. And these are so much more than that.
Thursday morning, Captain M-B left early with Jim and friends for a Field Somewhere on detecting business. And it was a very noisy day, with the gardeners roaring away with hedge trimmers and the scaffolders clanking outside the window. We are now netted in, so the moth trap/hotel is in retirement until the scaffolding comes down.
I came huffing and puffing back from my Gym lesson with my kind and patient young physio on Thursday to find a splendid box of flowers waiting for us. They were from a sister in the congregation, and they were a comforting present because of the loss of my field service partner Jean.
I have put them in some lovely pots that my best friend of our expat years, Anne Marie, made for us.
The Governing Body says that we will be restarting the door to door preaching work on September 1st. After over two years away from it, doing letter witnessing, it makes me very nervous. But I will have to remember Paul's words at Acts 20:20: "I did not hold back from telling you any of the things that were profitable nor from teaching you publicly and from house to house."
From house to house. And that is how the truth came to me - Christianity being called "the way of the truth" - all those years ago, when Ruby and Wilhelmina knocked at my door in my Northern hometown.
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