Christmas VI

 

 

Painting by Elizabeth O.

1 Jn 2:12-17   Ps 96:7-10   Lk 2:36-40

 

When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, 

they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. 

 

The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; 

and the favour of God was upon him.

Luke 2:39-40

—

 

The Hymn

By Marie Howe

It began as an almost inaudible hum,

   low and long for the solar winds

      and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,

   a song without words for the snow falling,

      for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,

   the hum turning again higher—into a riff of ridges,

      peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices

   then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows,

      the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:

   the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming, some of us rising

      as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested—another woke, standing

   among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;

      we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,

   in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,

      in the mud of the shantytowns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible, finding the chords as we

   found our true place singing in a million

      million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be:

   the song growing louder and rising.

      (Listen, I, too, believed it was a dream.)

The New Yorker April 1, 2024

 

 

 

The Hymn  Marie Howe