Just Plain

 

A little girl
Had wandered in the night, and now within
The shadows of a broken stall, was waiting,
While the night winds and the breath of time
Were moving over her...
Starlight moving imperceptibly,
The drift of time. And then a moment's fall,
The last that we should know of loneliness.
A sigh, unheard within the dark, and then...
She...wrapped him up in swaddling clothes,
and laid him in a manger.
And then
She knelt and held him close against her heart,
And in the midnight, adoration fused
With human love, and was not separate...
This is God's chosen way with men,
To take men's way: and so the streets she walks
And all the roads, the shepherd and the shepherds'
Sheep, the winds, the firelight, Israel's hills,
Will find just this, no more, a woman plain
Upon the earth, and in her arms, a child.
(The above is from "A Woman Wrapped in Silence"
by John W. Lynch)