Five Days Old

(For Christopher John)

Christmas is in the air.

You are given into my hands

Out of quietest, loneliest lands.

My trembling is all my prayer.

To blown straw was given

All the fullness of Heaven.

The tiny, not the immense,

Will teach our groping eyes.

So the absorbed skies

Bleed stars of innocence.

So cloud-voice in war and trouble

Is at last Christ in the stable.

Now wonderingly engrossed

In your fearless delicacies,

I am launched upon sacred seas,

Humbly and utterly lost

In the mystery of creation,

Bells, bells of ocean.

Too pure for my tongue to praise,

That sober, exquisite yawn

Or the gradual, generous dawn

At an eyelid, maker of days:

To shrive my thought for perfection

I must breathe old tempests of action

For the snowflake and face of love,

Windfall and word of truth,

Honour close to death.

O eternal truthfulness, Dove,

Tell me what I hold—

Myrrh? Frankincense? Gold?

If this is man, then the danger

And fear are as lights of the inn,

Faint and remote as sin

Out here by the manger.

In the sleeping, weeping weather

We shall all kneel down together.