A Christmas Poem

Since the Christmas season is approaching, I thought I would post this poem about the first Christmas.

An Untimely Birth




Moved with pity for her frail humanity,

He took her, on the day of the other nuptials,

Its virgin bride and her wedding party clothed

In linen finery, her face chastely veiled,

While his covered her belly with the coarse jalabiya

She had fashioned herself on the drop spindle.



The joyful klililililili in the streets

Echoed in the silence of his house.

Four parents ate together wordlessly

Before hers departed, leaving her to her new fate.

Mornings, when she drew water from the well,

Villagers—all two hundred of them—

Averted their heads while pointing at her with their eyes.



Then, a respite. Her cousin, twice removed—

And a hundred miles removed in space—

Received them in a place where no one knew

Their wedding date. She was simply

Another bride of another itinerant and jobless artisan

In an occupied land seeking the succor of kin.



During the barley harvest, they moved on yet again,

First to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem,

Returning to ancestral lands to glean enough

To discharge their debt to temple and state and,

If the expected offspring were male,

To redeem her firstborn from the priests.



There, in the stinking stable on her childbed of shame,

She longed for the redemption promised

By Daniel after the seventy sevens had elapsed,

Daring to hope this child,

In whom David and Aaron were met,

Would reconcile her, and this.



She stirred awake when Shepherds' sun-coarsened hands

Reached out to hold Bethlehem's newest son

Until, quietly, they arose and left.

Returning home, they told their wives,

For the next thing the mother in the stable heard

Was village women’s joyful ululating: klililililili.