Irritated, Watching a Living Nativity (Poem)

I peer into half-lit faces

Gazing rapt at this purported nativity,

Glowing from eggnog and the “miracle of birth."

Two gangly teens in bedsheets,

Their eyes not sunken

From a shameful pregnancy,

Travel in the third trimester,

Or the wracking anticipation of contractions,

Hold a swaddled plastic child—

Unbloodied, uncrying, inhuman.

The magi are a year too early

And don’t herald infanticide.

The shepherds are too respectable.

Nothing smells of excrement.

The true miracle feels unbeheld.

 

To be born is, to a child,

A first foretaste of dying.

To go from amniotic warmth—

Squeezed, crushed, rejected—

Into the biting air of living,

Harshly lit and uncradled.

It doesn’t take a stable

To make it a humiliation;

It takes every trick of neurochemistry

For us not to recoil.

 

To be born is, to a god,

Insane and nearly blasphemy.

Ineffable inscrutability

Poured into a shifting-plated skull,

Angel armies taking counsel

From a newborn’s burbles,

Immortality haunted by the

Numberable heartbeat metronome

To which we improvise days.

 

To be born was, for the Christ-child,

To spill out into a grim predestiny

Through all the common human

Betrayals and ignorance and tears,

Until Mary screamed again

Watching his propitiatory execution,

The little hands that clutched her breasts

Impaled.

 

There is no scandal here.

These people, serene and unoffended,

Will sing about a silent (ha!) night,

Go home to wrapping paper remnants,

And fall asleep full of ham and chocolate.

But I pray that maybe, from their midst,

A few harried souls might watch the story,

Glimpse a shared agony behind the beatified veil,

And hear the Spirit whisper,

“Immanuel.”