MORNING

M.C. Gardner

Strange it was that night

When the Yuletide airs of birth

Were companioned to the earth

With a father’s toiled passing.

The infant Jesus

Is often pictured

With a tiny cross

Held sweetly in that hand

That will one day know a knife,

And the Magi surely knew

That their journey to that cave

Was also to the grave

Of their loved and splendid Gods.

And the turning of the world

Was the winding of a shroud

That Christmas throe of birth

In a dying dispensation.

On a field outside of Midland

The snow glistened and was gone

Dew scenting sweet the hour’s

Anticipation of the dawn.

Death came like a soothing Magdalene

Releasing in a whispered

Anointing touch of flame

The burden of the fever

From its charge to there remain.

And a wind stirred softly on those waters

Darker than  a depth

Than those known by any sea.

Each night faith wings in caverns

A captive chrysalis of dreams

And what is often reenacted

We’ve rarely since believed.

Three timbers wine-stained wood grain

And a boulder barring entrance to a grave

Are among remembered fragments

When flesh returns to clay.

For in the end

The man some call the Christ

Was laid again to stone

As if returning home

Where as an infant he had lain.

Only the dead

Can speak knowingly of death

And perhaps

Lovingly, as well.

Of this family’s father

I knew little more than name

But I’ve come to love his daughter

And believe that love sustains.

For the windows of her eyes

Now seem the portals of his feeling

And what in the end was ash

Was mingled to the clasp

Of an infant evergreen

Growing deathless in a field

Which once knew only stones

But now it seems a home

As if a cradle in a cave

Where a stone was rolled away

In the quiet lilt of morning.