Time Kept by the Ox and Lamb
Mary nodded
Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
The ox and lamb kept time
Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
A wonderful
Metered
And who knows
Maybe jazzy moment
As
We’re talking
Myth
And magic
More imagination
Overall
The ox and lamb
They kept
Time
While the drum was played
By a boy
Not a grown-up
For this first
Time
Not by a symphony
If there were a chorus
One of angels
It might have gone
Pianissimo
Then
Mary nodded
She could have tapped her toes
Or snapped her fingers
Though she was
After birth
And if she had been tired
She might have been tired
Then
And it might have been enough
To nod
As well as Joseph
After the efforts with all things
Arranging
Only nodding
Too
And then at midnight
All the animals
Join in
With voices we could hear
As being ours
Which is the legend
So that there’s magic upon magic
Contemporary
Ancient
Added to the textual lore
For fun
Perhaps
And without doubt
For meaning
And so let all created things exist
Parents
Children
Animals
Imagination and
Stories to tell
To sing
Maybe like animals at midnight
In a tappy
Or a jazzy way
Even a little wild
Like the passing of the Spirit
Through
And for
All things
C L Couch
The song “Little Drummer Boy,” first known as “Carol of the Drum,” was written by Katharine Kennicott Davis, appearing in 1941.
Photo by Carlos Coronado on Unsplash
Twelfth Night or
(6 January)
What You Will
A modest title
For a late, great play
Did he mean the pun about
His name?
What you will, Will
Will who was not the starving
Artist or
Unknown in his time
It is twelfth night
Or the twelfth day of Christmas
Christmas, in fact, in the east
In may (and maybe your) liturgical
Calendar, Epiphany
In some parts I know, there will be
A boar’s head festival
A Christian way to say
We remember our English
And European roots
Deep down as they might be
Unseen for an age
What is epiphanous today is
What is found and realized in the
Christ story
The magi come to visit with the family
Of Joseph
To leave gifts for the child who
They discover is
The one they were searching for
The sky was writing them about
That was the ink
They were the page
The message now fulfilled
No return to Herod
The last part
There are other matters of
New knowledge in new light
Years after,
He comes to his cousin John
Whose voice speaks to
The wildness in the wilderness
He splits the world in truth
Those who will believe the one
Those who will believe the other
A parable one day applies
Of sheep and goats
Repent
Turn around
Follow his way,
Says he of the one he must baptize
Because deep knowing says they must
Do this
A dove descends
The Spirit is involved
To have a litany of three
Whose echoes elicited the start
Of everything from nothing
What happened to the gifts
Sometimes I wonder
Over-obsessed, they would become a movie
Like the subjects of both arks
And a spear of destiny
Maybe they were covered in a box kept by his mother
As was her way
To have her son and all that followed, after
The season before the season
An ending and beginning
It truly is
A new year
Time for decisions
Whom to follow
In the drama that our forms reflect
The play between all things
The material our due
The cosmos in the universe
Play on
C L Couch
Andrew Atzert from Mesa, AZ, USA – Family of DovesUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11044215
A Mourning Dove parent with two chicks in Mesa, Arizona, USA.
Christ Was a Refugee
Christ was a refugee
In Egypt
We do not know if Mary
Or Joseph had family there
Nothing is said
We know they traveled
To escape persecution
To miss the massacre
An insane king
Had decreed at home
clcouch123 
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