Like any supernumerary Joseph.
They both are kneeling, the woman and the child,
Their heads together. The closed window makes me
deaf
But I can see them talking over the bud
Or bug in the summer grass. I watch and love her
For the son I love but never gave her.
She carried him in her prophetic blood
Through ages. And I too suffered the love she suffered
For all the children in all the strangers' houses.
I ached with her meek envy of the mothered
World. And still the little outcast Moses
Lay hidden until one day our telephone
Rang bells from a distant city and sudden flesh
Was made of abstract faith. There we shone
With alarming haloes, standing inside the crèche
And trembling before the baby whose large brown eyes
Accused our ignorance by what he understood.
We saw and marvelled how fingers of this toy-size
Could bless all children with crosses of brotherhood.
Our lilting Ford escaped the city of signs
And fearful joys, and swung him with us home
To Nazareth. But always, always shines
In our known street and house that Bethlehem.
Of course this story, our story, is travesty
And passers-by may joke in fun or guile.
But when we look at them, the authentic three,
They are not laughing, not frowning; we see them
smile.
--Ernest Sandeen (1909-1997), poet and professor at the University of Notre Dame, from Poetry magazine, February 1955
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