Category: Poetry

Dear Shepherds

What was it like in Bethlehem,
after the sky ceased to shine,
there was nobody left to tell,
and the flocks needed a new pasture?
What was it like to hold such news
in your hearts, in your community;
to receive a tiny, infant Messiah?

What did you do the week after?
You went back to work, I assume,
days slowly resuming their routine.
You were changed, yet still excluded,
the messengers of God’s messengers
sliding back into obscurity.

Two years later, He was gone
to escape the coming sword;
no angels came to bring you further news.
Did faith flourish or flounder in the fields of Bethlehem,
how did you hold on to hope?

Thirty years on, do we find you at the Jordan,
washing clean in preparation?
Did you yearn through all those years,
taking up the mantle of Anna and Simeon?

You witnessed to God’s faithful fulfillment,
then found yourselves back in the fields
waiting for Messiah to grow up.

Reading between the lines, I wait with you,
holding hope in the tender arms of patience:

He came, He died, He rose; He will come again. Continue reading “Dear Shepherds”

Eyes on the Manger

I.
in case you’re wondering why everyone is lonely

I used to wonder at the way
a crowd
could feel lonely
feeling reality
without explanation

some say it’s a matter of
technology, this recent
digital life, before that
the industrial revolution, maybe
Rome’s roads drove us apart

some say it’s a matter of
words, possibility against
a lack of truth, define
for yourself what means anything
or nothing to anyone

some say it’s a matter of
perspective, who really knows
the life you’ve lived inside
looking in through the window
of their own experience

some say it’s a matter of
physics, that matter
never touches, have you ever
really touched another object
much less a person

some say it’s a matter of
sin, of protective clothing
hiding the truth, shameful
parts too much to bear
before God and man

now I wonder how this crowd
of disciplines can explain the reality
of aloneness so impartially
while the poets just bleed
words that never mean the same thing twice


II.
in case you’re wondering what more there is to say Continue reading “Eyes on the Manger”