They traced the heavens’ wheel of fire
By charts of omen, myth, and sign,
Where kings were weighed by fate’s desire
And stars obeyed a drawn design.

The planets spoke in numbered tongues,
In measured arcs and figured law,
They trusted what the sky had sung
And followed what their tables saw.

Yet something broke their careful sight,
A summons not in ink or sphere,
A light beyond predicted light
That pulled them past both craft and fear.

The signs fell mute before that flame,
No chart could hold its promise near.
The star outgrew the stars they claimed.

Above the straw, the beast, the breath,
The quiet labour of the poor,
A fixed and wordless brilliance set
Its crown upon a broken door.

No palace caught that steady fire,
No tower bent beneath its weight,
It chose the low, the small, the dire,
And shone without a guard of state.

As stars are born from crushing force,
From matter pressed till light ignites,
So God condensed His endless source
To flesh that cried against the night.

From pressure came that newborn flame,
From heaven’s weight to human slight
The infinite grew small in frame.

A star endures by loss of core,
By giving heat to hostile dark,
Each moment less than was before,
Yet true to its consuming spark.

So too this child would spend His years
In touch, in word, in healing breath,
Until the gathered weight of fears
Pulled love into the field of death.

For greater stars collapse at last,
Their ending fierce, their giving wide,
A final blaze too bright to pass,
That tears the veil of space aside.

The cross lay hid within that light,
A promised burn, a sacred tide,
Love’s mass collapsing into sight.

From broken stars our atoms came,
The iron drawn into our blood,
The dust that bears our breath and name
Was forged in stellar loss and flood.

So too His death was not decay,
But radiant fracture, vast and wild,
A life unmade to seed the clay
With grace no law or star compiled.

We are not saved by distant glow,
By untouched light that never bleeds,
But by a fire that chose to go
Through ruin to our deepest needs.

Behold our hope in shattered fire:
From holy loss, the world re-seeds
Salvation born of star expired