Friday, December 25, 2015

Merry Christmas!

A little girl
Had wandered in the night, and now within
The shadows of a broken stall, was waiting,
While  the night winds and the breath of time
Were moving over her...
Starlight moving imperceptibly.
The drift of time.  And then a moment's fall,
The last that we should know of loneliness.
A sign, unheard within the dark, and then...

She wrapped him up in swaddling clothes
and laid him in a manger.

And then
She knelt and held Him close against her heart,
And in the midnight, adoration fused
With human love, and was not separate....

This is God's chosen way with men,
To take men's way: and so the streets she walks
And all the roads, the shepherd and the shepherds'
Sheep, the winds, the firelight, Israel's hills,
Will find just this, no more, a woman plain
Upon the earth, and in her arms, a Child.

(from John W. Lynch's A Woman Wrapped in Silence)


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