Poems of the Incarnation (For the First Snowfall)

Work punctuated by breaks for poetry reading is quite nice.

When I went to my alma mater for homecoming a couple of weeks ago to visit some college friends, I stopped in at the campus store. While Dad was still here and I was still there, whenever he and Mom took me back to campus he would go to the campus store to buy candy and a book or two. When I sat down on the floor to slowly look at the books of poetry on the shelves during this most recent visit, I could almost see him standing on the other side of the shelf, glasses sliding down his nose a bit and an open book in hand.

I gave myself permission to buy a few books in his memory.

One of them is a book entitled Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation by Luci Shaw. This is the first I've read Luci Shaw's work, and I'm enjoying it. Collected in this particular book are her year-after-year Advent poems. A couple of them echo yet inside my heart.

The first poem I only want to quote two lines from ("Bluff Edge, Whidbey Island"):

This is the ragged planet where Christ landed,
and we are his people, craggy and knotted and burled...

The second poem I'll give you in its entirety.

"Jordan River"

Naaman went down seven times.
Imagine it--the leprous skin coming
clear and soft, and the heart too.
But can you vision clean Jesus
under Jordan's water? John the Baptizer did, 
holding the thin white body down, 
seeing it muddied as any sinner's
against river bottom, grimed
by the ground of his being.

Rising then, he surfaced, a sudden
fountain. But who would have expected 
that thunderclap, the explosion of light
as the sky fell, the Spirit seizing him, 
violent, a whir of winged light and sound
witnessing his work, his worth,
shaking him until the drops
flew from his shoulders, wet and common
and holy, Baptized sprinkling baptizer.