Christmas : Love Came Down

 

May your Christmastide be full of thankfulness…

Celebrating that glorious day when Emmanuel, God with us, God among us♥️

This is a poem I wrote and posted last year but it echoes my thoughts this year too.

I do not want a pristine Christmas this year

I want Mary, Joseph, and Jesus 

completely surrounded 

by the absence of family. 

I want the scent of blood and afterbirth 

and animal sweat and manure

(heavy and dank from a hotelier 

who had to prepare rooms for an onslaught

of census guests, not to muck out a shed 

for the birth of the King of kings).

 

I want shepherds with sand and grass 

clinging to the haste of their sandals

perspiration staining the arms of rough cloaks. 

And later, kings, diminished 

by an arduous journey resembling 

more mendicants than one percenters.

 

I want the moan of Mary in the cramping pain \

of the spent uterus

the dumbness of Joseph, struck 

by his paternal uselessness

the fumbling mutters of the shepherds 

still reeling from those loud, blinding angels

and kings, struggling to apologize 

for the gifts, not fit for [this holy] scene. 

 

I want Jesus, wailing at being dislodged 

from his throne and the embryonic bliss

I want the Creator of the world wrapped

in ragged strips of cloth, now stained with urine and stool. 

 

I do not want a pristine Christmas this year. 

I want one I know. 

Come

Emmanuel.