The Creche.

Stull, Jonathan

The Creche

   There is no comfort or joy
   Drawn in the suffering of this scene
   That lists in perspective ink
   And floats on a discolored whiteness
   Without star or magi wise
   To guide lost caravans of cargoed
   Covenants in the Yuletide
   Resurrection of childless tableaus

   Drafting my mothers manger
   Fusing every worldly enchantment
   Of summer nativities
   Unearthed across the ranging rivers
   And bluffs of flowers and stones
   On fisheries where the heron roost
   There is no balm or cradle
   Of salvation born in this framework
   Orphan of the spirit world
   A miracle that never happened
   As grey lines vanish to snow
   Upon the thinly thatched and timbered roof
   Hope lived for some chant or psalm
   Spelled in the far quadrants of despair

   For a mother and father
   Ashed and urned in a bronzed forgetting
   Their shadows on summer grass
   Are sequins of color stitched on night
   In a child's dream of waking
   In the once upon a time morning

   Beside my lay-me-down-sleep
   Their breaths brush along a shuddered pane
   Their faces glassed with smudgings
   Of nightfall ashes ashes blowing
   Across a ringlet of moon
   Sound the creaking turns of their passing
   In the silent night wheeling them
   Homeward as bagged portraits for rising

   From the fire into the creche
   The fish flashed turtle backed clouds of kings
   Froth with the watery sheep
   As the wild reeds and riprap shepherd
   Their crossing their letting go
   And the slow rush toward the coming sea