Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 June 2007 02:55:27
3:37AM in June. The earliest dawn of the year is just beginning outside. My father and I stood out in the garden earlier, staring up at the stars, marvelling at the size of everything Out There. They're all gone now but for one, Vega, the brightest star in the summer sky, the handle of Orpheus's harp.
The year turns ever on, and I am lucky to be awake to see it.
I will stand outside, and watch the dawn as it rises, watch the sun as he brings us into tomorrow. I'll stand and watch Vega's last twinkle as he fades into the morning sky, listen to the birds as they welcome the day. I shan't sleep, not now. But that's alright, because right now it feels as though I am the only person awake in the world, standing in solitary awe as the dawn draws in.
"Night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards."
-From A Midsummer Night's Dream
"THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
-God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins