Thorn and Benediction

Poetry

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  • Star of Bethlehem

    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

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  • Birthday

    From winter’s bite to summer’s flame,
    I crossed the earth to feel this sky,
    Leaving a name I cannot claim,
    A garden buried in goodbye.

    The moorlands reach still for my bones,
    Their damp is lost beneath this dust,
    I wear my age like weathered stones,
    Carnelian fire, now turned to rust.

    The gods I knew have lost their claim,
    Their temples scattered in my mind;
    New spirits call me by my name,
    Yet speak in tongues I cannot find.

    They tell the same old cosmic tale
    Of ash and birth, of fire and grief
    But whisper it through hidden hail,
    And leave my heart without relief.

    The stars are beasts I’ve never seen,
    Their ancient faces rearranged
    With myths rewritten and stripped clean,
    Old constellations lost or changed.

    The feasts I kept are out of place
    Spring hymns now fall in autumn’s hand,
    I raise my cup with aching grace
    For seasons I can’t understand.

    And in these rites I stand alone,
    A pilgrim dressed in borrowed days,
    Still hearing echoes of the stone
    Where once I knelt in older ways.

    I thought I knew the world as true,
    But now I see the cracks and seams,
    Where memory’s lies are born anew,
    And nothing’s ever what it seems.

    I hold the ghosts I cannot touch,
    I walk the roads that crack too soon.
    Yet still I reach for what I’ve lost,
    A home turned over with the moon.

  • The Veil

    I tasted dust as soldiers moved
    yet kept my woven dignity,
    His dying shadow downward proved
    a mass He laid in gravity

    I kept His gaze when crowds fell still.
    I drank His blood, I drank my fill.
    I bore His face, I bear it still.

    They gave me to His blood-loved cheek
    and warmth broke out like iron flame,
    the heavens bent, the void did speak
    as if to know His fading name.

    I caught His breath before it shied.
    I caught the storm the world denied.
    I keep the truth they crucified.

    The centuries drift past my thread
    yet still His outline burns my weft.
    The pilgrims kneel, their hopes half-dead
    to seek the face that bloodmark blessed

    I bind the wound creation dreads.
    I bind the light His passing sheds,
    I bind him where all sorrow threads.

    My threads are dark and weave the night,
    and night is stitched through every star;
    I felt His skin become that light
    that travels outwards, faint and far.

    I bear the mark the cosmos keeps,
    in pulse that slows yet never sleeps,
    in silence where the fallen weep.

    The comets pass like candles blown,
    their icy tails like trailing cloth;
    I feel in them what I have known
    the touch of One who faced the Wrath.

    I hold the cold of drifting stone,
    I hold the fire no star has shown,
    I hold His image carved as tone.

    When spheres collapse in dying rings
    their golden dust is drawn to me;
    I learned such ends from human kings
    who nailed His breath upon a tree.

    I keep the dark the void reveals,
    I keep the wound no time can heal,
    I keep the truth all worlds conceal.

    The galaxies in spiral fall
    like linen twisted in the loom;
    I felt that turning once and all,
    the day His face wove through my gloom.

    I hold the spin of His despair,
    I hold the breath He left in air,
    I hold the stars that turn in prayer.

    And when the heavens fold like cloth
    and all creation’s seam is torn,
    they’ll raise me up, His final oath,
    the scrap that saw the world reborn.

    I’ll bear His face when light is done,
    I’ll bear the night of every sun,
    I’ll bear the end when all is gone.