Not Far From the Nativity

Blessed are those who wait, I think the beatitudes said
But here I am in line again at the grocery store
Having been cut upon twice already
By people, unawares I hope, pushing my patience near breaking.

A man behind me, unremarkable other than that he smells of manure and pig wheat
Is balancing unsuccessfully a loaf of sandwich bread,
A bottle of wine, a pack of bubble gum cigars,
And a floating “It’s a Boy” balloon he said was for his daughter.

“Clean up on aisle 3; wet mop” said a voice, crackly and broken
From nowhere, from everywhere, from heaven.
And in a moment the man was gone, though his items on the floor held his place in line,
While I stared at length at the balloon, tied now to his wine, here but not here.

And another patron had cut, and the line had cleared in front of me,
And the man, down aisle 3, stooped down on his knees,
Was gathering broken glass and pickle juice,
The fluorescent lights forming a halo around his head.

I wrote this first draft of a poem at a kind of poetry workshop we held at our house church recently. While much of our church practice is talking in response to a story of some action of God, what we see in those stories is people singing, crafting poetry, creating in response to God. So we fashioned brief poetry guidance and gave ourselves eight minutes per stanza for each of us to write our own poem in response to the story of Christmas: God becoming one of us in the birth of Jesus. Inspired by Wendell Berry’s “Remembering That it Happened Once” where Berry imagines opening his barn door, which he had opened a hundred times before, to this time find the holy family, enacting The Nativity right there in his barn. We looked also to Malcolm Guite’s “O Emmanuel” in which Guite calls the incarnation of Jesus “O long-sought with-ness for a world without.” And finally, we relied on Mary’s Magnificat, the song she sang in response to the announcement that she would bear the One that her people had for so long waited. In all of these poems, the author locates the activity of God not somewhere off in some distant place, but right here in our world, right where we need it.

Here is the poetry guidance with which we worked (we put all our poems in a digital book we subtitled “First Draft Advent Poems from a House Church” to take the pressure off; they are, after all, first drafts). If you’d like to give it a try, give yourself eight minutes per stanza, don’t hold yourself to tightly to the outcome, and give yourself the grace of many revisions:

Stanza 1

2 lines about waiting
2 lines related to waiting including the concept of patience

Stanza 2

2 lines about a stable, barnyard, feed trough
2 lines about being born

Stanza 3

2 lines about God as an intruder
2 lines about God as a human

Stanza 4

2 lines about waiting again, revisited in light of stanza 3
2 lines about being surprised

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