Since it is Christmas time, I thought I would share 2 poems I gleaned from Kester Brewin’s book Signs of Emergence. I hope you enjoy them and they do what poetry does best–touches our souls…
Caesarean Sections
From Caesar, a census
Grim counting and recording
He rationalizes all he has fought over.
From God, a song
Divine harmony from angels uncountable
An irrational freedom and declaration of peace,
while…
Herod, the puppet king
His opulent palace, sick with ear
Echoing with insecurity and desperation at
Christ the true king
His pungent bed and mother’s arms sick with fear
Swaying with insecurity and desperation as
1000 mothers scream and 1000 innocents die.
This puppet flailing and the death throes of
destruction
Cutting down young life in fear that
A young life will cut him down
while…
In the temple, the priests declare peace
That all is settled.
That God has assured them of their place.
So they take their places at overloaded tables
Too comfortable to crane necks at wandering stars
and
Too settled for chilly hillsides.
But God is unsettled
Uncomfortable in this petrified home
And slips away unnoticed through the curtain,
while…
The bitter old mann stands at the gates of the earth
Waiting
Watching
Guarding the only entrance and exit to the citadel
planet.
The babies file in and the dead file out
And he watches them
Grimly keeping count……..
He watches
He waits
He shivers to shake
The tired cold from his limbs
For he must stay awake
For the one they say will attempt a salvation.
He keeps one eye on the horizon
On the distant reaches of the future
Where from surely his nemesis will ride with
armies
And demand entry:
The battle of the gates of the earth
So heighten awareness and tighten security and
all the while…
He does not notice the infant God
Slipping in among the embryonic ranks
Of those awaiting entry.
Become powerless
To slip the trap of the powerful.
A Trojan baby
Now inside the citadel planet.
Waiting, hiding, growing
Evolving an inner salvation.
(The original subversion)
THE GREAT REVERSAL
Walking with the crowds
Carried along by the pressing forward.
Each one eager to get ahead
But each one starting the same:
Born as a baby, and from then on, struggling towards
meaning, power and influence.
Be someone
Be remembered
Make a big impression.
Leave some indelible mark in your 3 score years
and 10.
From birth, a struggle to find eternity, to burst
through life with such dazzling intensity, that
everyone will remember forever:
But walking the other way, picking out a route
against the crowds, a solitary figure passes me…
passes all of us–all straining away innocence, to
be someone,
And he passes us, a quiet chaos in the crowd.
Christ, eternal, omniscient, creator, beyond time,
source of wisdom and beyond petty claims of
influence … in very nature God, slips into reverse
and walks back past us–away from Kingship,
away from power, and away from influence, away from
eternity, away from wisdom … towards infancy.
Calmly stepping into the body of a tiny child.
And even as this baby grows, figuring out how to con-
trol the body he himself designed, he still walks the
other way, realizing that life cannot be found in the
struggle for permanence, but in giving it up.
This Great Reversal subverts me. Tired of pressing
forward, I realize I need to turn, for what I have
been searching for has just walked past me the
other way.
