“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany”

“We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,” writes poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, “But he is with a million displaced people/ On the long road of weariness and want./ … His family is up and on that road,/ Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,/ … The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,/ And death squads spread their curse across the world./ But every Herod dies, and comes alone/ To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”

This portion of Guite’s poem, “Refugee,” commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, reminds readers of “what might be called ‘the shadow side’ of the Christian story, … a season that looks back at the people who waited in darkness for the coming light of Christ and yet forward to a fuller light still to come and illuminate our darkness.”

For Guite, who has performed in San Francisco and other US (and UK) venues, poetry can “help us restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us….”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany” ($15.99 in paperback from Canterbury Press Norwich; also for Amazon Kindle) provides reflections on each poem so that the revelatory words of a John Donne lie clear before the reader. 

Contemporary poet Luci Shaw, in “Kenosis,” writes of the babe: “So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,/ broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,/ wept for the sad heart of the human race.”

Advent brings joy, too; Guite includes his sonnets “written in response to the seven Advent prayers known as the ‘O Antiphons’” addressing Christ “by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!” ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light! ‘O Emmanuel!’” For December 19, Christ is the “root of Jesse,” but more: 

“For now is winter, now is withering/ Unless we let you root us deep within,/ Under the ground of being, graft us in.”