John 1:14 (A Christmas Poem)

Tonight at church we sang Silent Night and I do not understandbecause I do not think the night stood by silentlyWhen he ripped a hole in the roof and rapelled umbilically into our repulsivefeed troughI think that his birth was bloody and that Mary shrieked and sobbedand he could have been stillborn as he convulsed her 12 or 13 or 14year old frameand the excrement so thick on the air that it was more taste than stenchand the baby child blue and cold shrieking and sobbing all the louderas the other child his mother began to abate, or maybe to pass out from the pain andmalnourishment and infection and frostbite.It was neither calm nor brightand no one cleaned up the blood and placenta–not the shepherds, who were most assuredlychildren themselves, orphans,and especially not Joseph, who probably still suspected that he had been cuckolded andmaybe had never seen a birth beforeand was not prepared for the child to live or to die in the cave in which he crouchedhaplessly. And this is why I think the night is holy:because Jesus did not look like Lord at his birth.He looked like the earth;specter of Adam and death andthe slimy dark of the unstableheartsof men and children and women and childrenAnd his tiny lungs quivered and shook when he interceded for us with groans too deep for words. And who will save us from this body of death?Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.