Unto us a Son is Given

 

Unto us a son is given:

In a home birth, far away from home,

Birthweight unknown,

Apgar score unchecked,

and Love speaks in a weak, thin newborn cry.

 

Unto us a son is given,

And they came.

Not the respectable townsfolk, reputation-wrapped,

But the rough guys from the sheep pens

Knives in belts,

And accents thick as grease,

Clomping their way into the Holy Place,

Tongue tied and awkward

Muttering of angels,

Seeing something there

That overwhelmed strong men.

 

Unto us a son is given:

In the deeps of the night

Cutting the starlit silence

While men slept their banal sleep

And only angels watched

 

Unto us a son is given.

When he came

We did not know what to do with him.

Indifference, doubt,

Rejection, torture, death.

Only a few

Shaken from sleep,

Saw the whole thing through

Amazed with much amazement.  

 

Unto us a son is given

Given still

That we might come

Come see what God has done

What God is doing

And what God will do

Through the most ordinary

Love breaks through

And we are born anew.

 

For the Nerdy Girls

 

This one is for the nerdy girls

With their heads in books, and books inside their heads,

Bored with the tea-time chatter about things of no concern,

Their minds dancing with questions,

Their hearts dancing with wonder,

At a world too big for words.

 

This is for the girls whose tongues trip over words

Read but not heard;

Who try hard not to laugh

At accidental puns,

Who get lost because they were thinking

Of something else entirely.

Who, when warned “men don’t like brains”

Can’t imagine why they’d care.

 

This is for the girls who cannot flirt

Because saying something you don’t mean

Is a paralysing confusion;         

People and feelings matter

And they don’t understand the game,

Girls who feel their awkwardness

As deep as a disgrace

But still choose to be themselves

At any price.

 

This is for the girls who can forget

One hundred “supposed to’s” in the grips

Of a great idea that sweeps them off the earth

Into the rarefied realms.

Girls whose hearts

Turn cartwheels while they trip over their feet.

 

And this is for the girls who learned to live

Through books,

The girls who had no other teachers,

Who grew and left their early angst behind,

Who found their feet, and found their hearts and smiled,

And never, ever, ever ceased to learn.