There was a time
when the world
Like an arctic desert wasteland
Frozen and forbidding
Made no room
For hopeful celebration
Always winter never Christmas
Hollow men filled themselves
With a little dried tubers
Or whatever they could find
Thinking none to thank
Praised themselves to survive
Some fell- weary of their own weight
And the rebel burdens they carried
Others hoped in promises
Looking forward to the day
they could not see
Though prayed their children would
Until then came to pass
The world’s first Christmas eve
Humble and meek
Condescending deity
Full of grace and truth
The earth slept unaware
What glorious dawn – warm –
Would be at their waking
The rest of the poems from Rusten Harris’s Advent series on Moss Kingdom:
Incarnation, Christmas Eve, Kings, Some Kind of Glory, Chains, Gifts, Quotidian Couple, A Thousand Lights, Eve & Mary, Treasured Up, Christmas, Winter Staves, The Glorias, Cherubim, Joseph, Strange Redeemer, Womb, Magi, Temple Trough, Advent, Lord’s Day, Far as the Curse is Found, Jubilee, The Massacre of the Innocents, Liturgical Time
Other Advent poems on Moss Kingdom:
December 21: an Advent poem for the Winter Solstice, Of Edmund and Aslan, Tiptoe Hope, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats