Advent Poem

I wrote this poem last Christmas one night when I couldn’t sleep:

 

Advent Vigil

Houses exhale frozen clouds into the December air.

Snow dusts onto rooftops, streets, balsams, solid creek beds.

It thickens, shaping park benches into Henry Moore sculptures.

To my myopic eyes the Christmas lights are starbursts, winter flowers.

 

What keeps me awake in the dark, early hours of winter?

Is it my mother’s diminishing days, or my own?

 

Trees, black spears, strain, but cannot pierce the milky sky.

The coffeemaker grumbles as my husband sleeps.

 

On such a night You joined us, slipped into our dreaming world quietly,

As though You had always been here, sharing our air, our sounds, our bread.