we pursued was truth.
When we were there, we found our goal
Lodged in a kind of booth.
Down we dismounted, knelt and gave
Frankincense, gold and myrrh.
Herod demanded we report,
But we did not concur.
We then returned to our homelands,
Better for having gone,
All of us changed by truth we'd seen:
Light of the coming dawn.
MATURING
Each day means fewer things that he can do.
Some years ago he lost his sense of smell,
and now he hardly bends to tie his shoe.
You understand. I'm sure that you can tell
he's getting old, he's edging toward his grave.
Slave traders aren't enticed; he wouldn't sell.
I won't say he is cowardly or brave—
he's just uninterested in pain or fear.
He's lived from birth inside an autoclave.
But now his heart is cooked, his eyes are blear,
and he has seen some things he'll never say,
except by tangents, from this biosphere.
One thing he still delights in is to play
while kneeling with the children as he'd pray.
BIRTHPLACES OF IMMORTALITY
Cities and hamlets that lay wherever the Greeks
pronounced their Hellenic language claimed
to be birthplace and home of the father of poets, great Homer:
Chios, Salamis in Cyprus, Ionia, Smyrna,
and even Egyptian Thebes. But a man can be born
in a single location alone, and so one speaks true,
while the others are wishful pretenders who wink at the truth.
So do the tumbled adorings of India lie,
and the horse and the flame of the Persians, the disengagement
of Buddha in China, the worship of trees and of animals,
Arabic efforts to bolster their racial esteem—
lies to acquire for themselves the home-place of God.
But He broke into time at a single location, a Man,
perturbing the ones who, if able, had sent Him back home.
THE CAMEL AND THE NEEDLE'S EYE
The rich young man speaks
I have more sheep and goats, more houses, slaves
than Job before disaster laid him low.
My wife is out of Solomon and bears
a stair-step line of children to my fame.
But here and there I see a boil upon
the smooth skin of my life, a sign that all
may one day, in a sudden wind, collapse
and leave me naked, unprotected, shamed.
I woke some nights ago and felt the hands
of doubt, of indecision, of my youth
that gripped my neck and told me I am small.
When dawn returned (how long the night can be)
I checked my wealth and saw fragility.
So when I heard a teacher was nearby
I went to him and caught Him on the point
of leaving us. I wanted some assurance
that my acts, which held to Moses' law,
were adequate to buy eternal life.
He seemed at first to ratify my goal
by listing those commands I had obeyed.
But when I said I'd kept them all my life,
He saw the wall of safety I had built
around my life: my wealth, my comfort, shield
against humiliation and decay,
and laid his hand of discourse on those bricks.
Allow me here to tear it all away,
He said, and follow me to deathlessness.
At once I saw myself as stripped and shown
for children's entertainment and for fools.
I saw myself again a shameful child,
embarrassed, disrespected and debased.
These crumbs of good, I thought, had kept me warm
thus far. Why lose this good to grasp at one
that was a promise only, one man's word?
So I declined and went back to my keep
and sat among my rotting palisades.
I later heard the Romans nailed Him dead,
but He revived. If that proves true, I'm lost.
THE EDGE OF LIGHT
A clearing in old growth,
a campfire at its hub,
our tents pitched all around
along the edge of light.
We lay in sleeping bags,
some telling tales
to push the dawning near
the threat of darkened woods.
The stories went around
until we mostly were
agreed that some had shed
new light upon the fire—
redundancy of course.
Some lay along the edge,
while others went too far
into the baffling dark
for us to understand,
and so brought in more dark.
We've moved our tents away
at almost every dusk
to know more of what used
to be the trackless dark.
But some still love the dark
because it seems to them
that it will make them free.
We've had no word from them,
only their gargled pleas.
OUR WAIT FOR THE MESSIAH
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation
of the dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
Like those who waited near where Jesus prayed,
we