Christmas Week take Two

 

I pray you found joy/laughter/hope/peace/love in Billy Collins’ poem from yesterday.  You may want to re-read that poem prayer today and every day for the coming weeks.  You can return to poetry time and time again (like Scripture) always finding something new, because YOU are different every time you read a poem.

 

Today, I invite you to turn toward the poem, “December Morning in the Desert,” by Alberto Ríos.

 

Before you read the poem below, have you ever been to the desert?  What was the experience like?  My family and I visited the desert in the middle of summer.  It was hot and dry.  I suddenly knew what it was like to be a shirt twirling and tumbling in the dryer.  I never knew how heat could just wrap around you like a blanket and the sun unceasingly soak everything all around. 

 

Even if you have never been to the desert, let Rios take us there with these words:

 

“The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,
More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,

This crisp, Arizona shore, where desert meets
The coming edge of the winter world.

It is a cold news in stark announcement,
The myriad stars making bright the black,

As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.
But the stars—all those stars,

Where does the sure noise of their hard work go?
These plugs sparking the motor of an otherwise quiet sky,

Their flickering work everywhere in a white vastness:
We should hear the stars as a great roar

Gathered from the moving of their billion parts, this great
Hot rod skid of the Milky Way across the asphalt night,

The assembled, moving glints and far-floating embers
Risen from the hearth-fires of so many other worlds.

Where does the noise of it all go
If not into the ears, then hearts of the birds all around us,

Their hearts beating so fast and their equally fast
Wings and high songs,

And the bees, too, with their lumbering hum,
And the wasps and moths, the bats, the dragonflies—

None of them sure if any of this is going to work,
This universe—we humans oblivious,

Drinking coffee, not quite awake, calm and moving
Into the slippers of our Monday mornings,

Shivering because, we think,
It’s a little cold out there.”

 

I love how this poem draws our attention to the vastness of life and the ordinary of slippers on our Monday mornings.  I love how Rios connects humans to the variety of creation.  I pray this poem opens you to God’s presence on this day.  Amen.