When the World Cries, New Born
I sit in the dark beside the bedroom window. The ocean hurls and roars its foamy rage at the cliff my house sits on. Rain and sleet shoot the glass. Welcome, new day.
It is a December day like most December days in Kodiak, when storms upset the seas, when fog settles in like a plague and the light leaves too early, comes too late. We scurry still like spiders along our webs bent in the wind, but planes lie still. Nothing can fly. The mailbox is empty. No mail or packages this day again. Third day in a row.
A day like any other day, this. A month like any other month. Yet into this grey breaks a cloud hovering, a cloud glowing beneath. Hark. Halt. A piece of light, a shiver of sun glows the sky over the spruce. Maybe Christmas will come today.
It is possible. If I leave the stores, turn off the radio, if I open this thick book with the textured cover beside my bed, something might happen. But there is danger here. There is risk in these words. Do I dare crack these pages?
And inside, it happens. Christ comes today to this dark-tired heart, these half-closed, leaking eyes. He finds me again. In the midst of page and words, He crooks his finger and draws me close.
“You? You did this? You did this– -for us?”
Incarnation
by Amit Majmudar
Inheart yourself, immensity. Immarrow,
Embone, enrib yourself. The wind won’t borrow
A plane, nor water climb aboard a current,
But you be all we are, and all we aren’t.
You rigged this whirligig, you make it run:
Stop juggling atoms and oppose your thumbs.
That’s what we like, we like our rich to slum.
The rich, it may be, like it too. Enmeat
Yourself so we can rise onto our feet
And meet. For eyes, just take two suns and shrink them.
Make all your thoughts as small as you can think them.
Encrypt in flesh, enigma, what we can’t
Quite English. We will almost understand.
If there are things for which we don’t have clearance,
There’s secrecy aplenty in appearance.
Face it, another word for skin is hide.
Show me the face that never lied.
I see it. Or at least, the light that comes from that face. It rises this morning, over the sea, the houses, the spruce. The audacity of sky finally blue, and I remember again—–
Yes, we have met before.
Oh God! To come and be us and meet us—-
The world cries, newborn.
I cry, new born.
