Nativity 2023 - Gail Onion

[Larry Robinson]

Nativity 2023

Humanity has assassinated our way across the world
in grievous indifference to the suffering we cause.
Now it is the sacrifice that war demands and 
no mercy for the living .
Will the earth reap again from roots of blood
into blossoms and fruit? 
Will we grow children from deracinated wombs
of mothers who hang from crosses 
with cruciform babies clinging from their outstretched arms?
The Truce has ended with the Covenant of Creation
long ago, the small print reads: some humanity survives, all else
are resources.
The holy family, Mary swollen with child
stumbles, totters, almost falls, while Joseph grimly seeks shelter,
but there are no  inns, no stable, no manger for 
there is nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep, insatiable
war has devoured home, country, peace, love,
there is no welcome for this babe.
They kneel in rubble 
beside a broken stall, and
a sickly cow, withered udders hang down.
A thin lamb has crawled beside the mother
and made a bed of wet soiled straw. 
The shepherds were blasted from the hills this morning.
A bedraggled angel, bespattered with blood, tears, shards of glass,
tree bark, torn pages from the Bible, 
looks up at a star blinking off and on.
The birth comes quickly
in a rush of alluvial flow 
as if the rivers of Eden were being spilled.
What child is this
whose hour has come round,
why here, why now?
for who is left to defend
this frail chalice of God?

In the distance, across time,
we are the Magi who travel over the deserts 
patiently, defiantly, persistently.

We will arrive at the bridge of opposites,
beast and child, hate and apathy, fear and love.
With every step pushing  peace out from within us,

pushing peace before us, widening
the circle of peace around us, 
encircling compassion and deprivation
with beauty and love, 
peace above us and peace beneath us.

This is the way we will come,
defending what remains of truth and justice, 
defending what is being born in the most wretched of places,
filling and overfilling the Chalice of Mercy and Peace,
the relentless infallible ones, we will come.
 
	- Gail Onion