A boy!

Haiku of survival

Time’s dust has settled,

Joseph has been forgotten.

They are guests no more.

Israel’s children

have prospered in Egypt land;

but now they are feared.

Israel’s children

are made slaves. They are oppressed,

and forced to labour.

Their lives are bitter,

they are treated brutally;

there is no relief.

Final solution

number one: kill all the boys

as soon as they’re born.

The midwives resist.

They explain: Hebrew women

don’t wait for midwives.

Throw them in the Nile,

those baby boys! But the girls,

you can let them live.

A boy-child was born.

His mother kept him hidden.

Three months. Too big now.

Made a reed basket,

floated it in the river.

His sister kept watch.

Coming down to bathe,

Pharaoh’s daughter saw the boat.

Her maid drew it in.

Surprise! It’s a boy!

You’ll need a nurse, said sister.

Can you find me one?

The mother was paid.

She nursed him. When he had grown,

took him to the court.

The princess raised him

as her son, named him Moses:

drawn from the water.

© Ken Rookes 2023

Witnesses

Two formerly obscure old people

become Luke’s surprising choice

as his final witnesses

to the Messiah’s birth.

In his historically improbable

but still entrancingly wondrous

natal narrative, he retrospectively presents us

with the excited pronouncements

of an elderly man and an aging widow.

Salvation for Israel,

light and hope for the foreigners,

redemption for Jerusalem;

here, in this infant.

Imagine if a pair of old people stood up

to deliver such outrageous observations

in our own time.

There probably wouldn’t be a camera crew

on hand to record the event

or interview the key players;

it would be unlikely to make the papers.

At best, there might be a few smiling selfies

with the old people, the mother and child.

Some, no doubt, would end up online;

maybe with a paragraph in someone’s blog,

to be reposted by a handful of friends,

or shared with a link.

Most likely we’d offer a patronising wink or a smile

and shake our collective heads

before joining in the joking dismissal.

Let’s face it, the elderly

probably weren’t taken seriously back then,

either. No one else seemed to notice,

or bothered to remember;

only Luke.

© Ken Rookes 2014

a message of love and vulnerability

"We spend a lot of time listening to and singing songs about the greatness of this child that is called the Christ but I wonder how much we understand it. It is not a sort of oohing and ahhing at the cute kid but rather a profound message about the nature of ourselves and the spiritual power of the child.

I guess as we come to this day with the background noise of terrorism threats and the horror of the world news, we wonder about whether this is a hollow celebration full of smultcz. But it isn’t. The message couldn’t be more significant. The message of love and vulnerability that this child is bringing is to transform the world. It is to bring a great light into the darkness. It is to tell that the power of the divine is not in powerful structures or domination but that true power lies in vulnerability and love. This is a message about the great love of God to all of a suffering humanity and so a message of a new hope.  To quote T.S Eliot again - "You bring me news of a door that opens at the end of a corridor, sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure that every corridor only led to another blank wall."

        The way the Bible tells it, the baby worked a kind of magic on the surrounding world on the night of his birth. Here is a new image of this ‘God’ not as an all-powerful God but rather as a helpless, vulnerable infant. The traditional image of ‘God’ is still a powerful, if old man ...not a helpless baby. The magic that surrounded the baby lifted people above the misery, cold and darkness that surrounded them so that all they could think about was the birth of this child.  We can surround ourselves with all sorts of distractions on this wonderful day but if we let ourselves forget the message that we hold the holy deep within us, then we have cheated ourselves of the true meaning of Christmas... Emmanuel - God-with-us! I love the lyric of a song by Sinead O’Connor that says that “All babies are born saying God’s name.”  

For some.

The wealthy and powerful ones;

rulers, kings and major shareholders

do a lively trade in information.

They invest some of their ample resources

in finding out stuff, analysing trends and opinion,

and gathering whatever facts can be assembled

from their multiple sources

in order to gain advantage over everyone else.

Knowledge, they say, is power;

who would argue?

In his terrible nativity story, Matthew

presents us with the despotic Herod,

who, sensing a threat to his kingly power

in the unlikely birth of a child,

demands, of his royal advisors,

insight and opinion. It is his hope

that when the appropriate dots

have been successfully joined,

they will indicate a profitable course of action.

And just when,

he confidingly enquires of the wise strangers,

feigning concern for the success

of their crazy adventure;

did the star first appear?

Having sent the gift-laden travellers to Bethlehem,

in accordance with some long-forgotten oracle,

he awaits their return,

along with the specific details,

(parents, street name and number),

that they will supply.

He must have waited some time;

the successful pilgrims, as the story goes,

were recipients of further information,

and went home by another way.

The ever-pragmatic Herod was unconcerned;

it was a minor inconvenience.

Their answer to his earlier question

had been duly noted by his scribes;

it would be sufficient for his mathematicians

to make the necessary determinations

that would allow his troops to do their job.

The baby’s parents also received advice

that enabled them to choose a path to safety.

Not so blessed were other young children

in Bethlehem. Knowledge, they say, is power;

for some.

©Ken Rookes 2012

Beginnings

The seed that grows within the womb

of the bewildered child-woman

began, we are told,

as a loving, aching thought

in the mind of God.

The mysteries of our mortal being

lie deep in the pre-historic

annals of creation,

defying the simple explanations

of both religion and reason.

Those who embrace faith

will insist on one thing alone:

that its source is also love.

This love, they declare

in obedience to the one who they follow,

is the beginning of all that is good

and beautiful and true.

We cannot say with confidence

that the acts leading to impregnation

all have their genesis at that same point;

but their outcomes, small, pink and vulnerable,

always take us there.

Through circumstance

the child-woman from Nazareth

finds herself with her husband

in a Bethlehem stable; or so one story goes.

In this humble shelter, lacking in amenity

but with its own strange appropriateness and beauty,

the moment arrives; and the baby

is delivered among the straw,

with all the requisite pain, groans, tears and blood.

In this place, made holy,

and at this instant rendered sacred,

love begins its wondrous journey of fulfilment

among us all.

© Ken Rookes 2012

yeats poem

The three-fold terror of love: a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.
Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?
What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?
-W.B. Yeats 1865-1939

Now that's an epiphany!