Hail Mary, full of grace
Did childbirth hurt on that first Christmas
Or was labor immaculate too
Free of contact
Free of pain?
Blessed art thou among women
If that were truly the case
Pray for us in our hour of death
Because we seem to be racing toward it
O come, O come Emmanuel
To ransom faith from religion
To remind those who claim to follow
That love still covers multitudes of sins
Until the Son of God appears
Not that they’d recognize you today
Because you’re not white, or Protestant,
Or born in the United States
Rejoice! Rejoice! And mourn in lonely exile
Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison!
Oh, the little town of Bethlehem
Seems light-years and centuries away
From our land of the free
Our home of brave believers
Who disregard and disrespect the stranger
Who mock and ignore the poor
Who hide our nation’s sins under a bushel
And tear them from the pages of school textbooks
How far away is that manger now
As we trade no crib for a golden ballroom
And worship a painted calf
Parading in the skin of a bull
The only lowing of cattle
Is the bellowing
From the pulpits of government
The baby is crying
We should all be crying
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb
Of all wombs: red, yellow, black, white
Both foreign and domestic
Created in the image of God
Endowed with inalienable rights
The stars look down where they lay
To see what? —
Hail Mary, full of grace
Remember us in this, the hour of our death
We do not live in the blessings of the immaculate
We live in the world of touch and pain
Where beings from man to woman and back again
Must bump against
The bulk of the other
All day, every day, and I imagine all that bumping
Must be what causes us to hate each other
Enough to put people in cages, enough to bomb innocents
Be near me, I pray, our King of Peace. Amen. Amen.
© 2025 Sean Taylor
Incarnate
They say
the secret miracle of Christmas
Is
Immanuel, God with us,
They say
it is the Word becoming flesh
And
dwelling among us.
I hear
their words,
But I
feel they miss the point:
We are
already incarnate.
Here
from the moment we stood upright,
The day
we fashioned clubs,
The year
we scribbled pictures onto cave walls.
God has
always been with us
Because
we were already here.
Some say
the meaning of Christmas
Is the
newborn king,
The
Prince of Peace, the son given,
And yet
again,
The
words fail to reach
Our
incarnate ears of flesh.
Lips
praise peace, hands and wills abhor it,
A grand
idea, but it’ll never work
In the
real world of mucous and muscle.
A
beautiful notion fluttering too high above the garbage
For us
to attempt,
So we
sing songs about it instead.
© 2025 Sean Taylor
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