As has been my custom at Christmas in recent years, I offer today a couple of my poems. Since no one has time to read blogs at Christmas, it is the perfect time to share poetry, since no one reads poetry anymore anyway. It is my gift to you, either the gift of poetry to read or the gift of time if you do not read. May your Christmas be blessed nevertheless.

The Visitation

It is expected that a doctor would visit an old woman―

but not to ask what she remembers.

You ask now.

You can be sure no one asked me such questions then

or would have believed the answers if they had.

Yet I committed these things to memory,

going over and over them in my heart,

so they are preserved whole,

perhaps precisely for this moment.

I am ready to be delivered of this burden

as I was ready to be delivered of another burden then.

The days are fulfilled for this too.

Do not doubt that the joy of the delivery

overshadows the pain till it is forgotten.

My service done, I can at last be dismissed in peace.

Someone else said that too, long ago.

I can tell you what I know,

what I saw and heard…and felt.

But to understand,

now that takes a lifetime of pondering,

and I am not done yet.

Even now, we can see only the beginning of what was meant.

It is barely morning,

and I will be gone long before it is full day,

but I can see it coming.

Why, I foretold it,

though I did not know then what I was saying.

Sit down and set down what I will tell you,

and you will be writing a prescription for all the world’s ills.

Perhaps your skill may even preserve an old woman’s memory.

I cannot say I was expecting this, but it, too, was planned long ago.

It is expected that a doctor would visit an old woman.

Joseph, Help My Unbelief

He obeyed the dream,

an indication surely he believed

that she had not betrayed him,

that this seeming act of sin

was righteousness lived out,

that God had really spoken in the dark.

But in this man so much like us,

could faith be pure, unmixed with doubt?

In an imperfect world,

calculating options, did he allow

the dream to cover his desire?

Could he have chosen both

to pardon and believe,

hedging his bets,

biding his time

to see the resolution of it all?