the deepening ground

Arriving late for Christmas day itself, like the magi that arrived much later at the door to Jesus’ home (see Matthew 2:1-12), I come bearing three gifts: two poems and a song. I have spent the last seven days savoring time with family between my son’s wedding and celebrating Christmas itself. If you have a choice between making (or reading) posts online and spending quality time with family laughing, eating, playing games, and watching favorite films, you choose the latter. With the loss of multiple friends in the past year, I have only come to value time more dearly. More than anything else, I want to chronicle this new poem so I can come back to it again next year. It reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” that inspired the song “Journey” I recorded in 2012 (you can follow the links, if you like). Each work provides a fresh vision of the journey the magi took to the Christ-child, ultimately revealing how radically one’s life is transformed when you truly encounter the Word made flesh. The things of the earth (modernity) suddenly grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace!

Excrucielsis by Hannah Main-van der Kamp

EXCRUCIELSIS
          Epiphany, “a sudden enlightenment”

Star-struck Magus
drags his vision burden,
cold wind keens through his rib cage.
Straggler over dark hills
over darker vales.
He saw something once,
         a well of light
         a beckoning
         far away

         and shouldered it.

Must be his post-Christmas blues,
empty of pocket, beer-blearied
festivity wearied, with muzak-deafened ear.
Why not just drop
that craziness, that longing for
the something more, just
cheer up. Have a pill, have a drink.
Buy something.

Still proceeding, blister-lamed
not leaping, he reels over rough ground,
feeble, clutches the weight
of his deferred dream-

Look here are the January discount sales
and here the Tavern of Happiness. Come in come in
to the Entitlement Boutique.

- does not sense what even rocks might cry out
         the change in light
         a whistle-soft wind.
         Not far ahead
         a throng of angels wait
         for that trumpet, wait

         to un-shoulder him.

         EXCELSIS

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