Knocking Holes

Robert Louis Stevenson with his mother

When I was a child I loved the poet Robert Louis Stevenson and still remember being holed up in my bed with pneumonia, a copy of his A Child's Garden of Verses in my hands. 


I read this over at SecondSister Suaviloquy and loved it so much that I had to post it here. It was heard on an interview on NPR on Martin Luther King day.


It is said that Robert Louis Stevenson was a man who never enjoyed good 
health. He spent a lot of time in his room even as a child. He was always looking out the window. His nurse asked him one day, Robert, what are you doing? He said, I'm watching that old man knock holes in the darkness. She said, what are you talking about?

He would climb up the ladder and light the light, come down, move the ladder to the next pole, climb up, come down, move the ladder. And everywhere he would light a light it appeared to him with his little quick mind that a hole was being knocked in the darkness.

And so I'm suggesting that those of us who have the strength and the ability, we should be knocking holes in the darkness. So, Martin Luther King came to Memphis - it was a dark place to come, but he came and he came knocking holes in the darkness.