The First Friday Poem: Advent #1

Here I go, carving out a new streak. As I wrote this week, I’m setting out to publish a poem each Friday. Why? Because writing poetry opens my eyes to see the world differently and stretches my imagination. It serves as a creative tool for the examined life, too.

I’ve been working today’s poem since the Advent season, those few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was a particularly dark season in some ways, a season in which my family parted ways with a church we’d been members of for...