Hannington Mumo Poems

I never can plumb the depths of your art
Nor fathom the gifts of your fallen heart;
I revere the adept slither of your apt brush
And here pay homage to your pencil's dash.
...

Do you the words of the sages recall
That bit and bit make the whole?
Thus I beseech that in your toils this employ;
Learn little by little to do the task
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Uphill is the appointed track
For the anointed scholar
Who his brains continues to wrack;
As his hair keeps growing taller
...

Only those that see beyond
The tip of their nose
And break from folly's bond
Shall pass through the fire furnace.
...

Thomas Higgins was busy doctor
And spent his evenings with the rector
Who managed a nearby seminary;
He was a man loveably down-to-earth and ordinary.
...

Long before the colonialist came
With a club and a Bible to tame,
Came one Nicholas Abercombie,
Upon his chest a cross of fashioned tree
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Where else could Augustus Toplady shelter from spiritual storm,
But only in the Rock of Ages?
And what else could the burden of sin imply,
But woe and death its wages?
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Despised by finesse and mocked by success
He deemed this molestation excess;
Having found friends vain and inadequate
He could no longer wait,
...

A blessed evening by sin unspoiled,
Cleansed by blood not by sin tarnished
Upon the accursed tree of Calvary,
Shed by one by his own people banished.
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This world of shallow mortals,
Full of bumps and poholes;
I shall endeavour to tread
Upon it with careful dread,
...