We Tend to Those Between

Merry Christmas all ...

Christmas Poem ‘08

The candle-lit services are over, packages have been opened –
As is custom on this side of the family
Six hours more dawn will appear lighting up the mountain peaks
Beaver Mountain (now called by an Anglo name), the highest of them all
Will light up first – on clear mornings it looms brilliant pink
Before it fades to sustainable hue
It is the dark hours of Christmas morning, and I wonder this silent holy eve
What went on for one and a half millennia in this Valley
Before the name of Christ arrived on the lips of white skinned settlers
And crosses were erected
On a continent with the oldest living tree named Methuselah
A name from the stories of men who kept written records
Arapaho named the rocks above that have been re-named
Meeker, Longs, Hallet, and Washington
As if nothing was before
And all that is was ferried across the Atlantic
As so many Jews in canoes - as told in the etchings of the golden plates that Joseph Smith read
We sing Joy to the World, O’ Little Town of Bethlehem and Hark the Herald Angels
And this is good
But yet I hear the voice of Black Elk
Whose visions matched the Black Robes good-news tale
Here amidst the sage and sparkling streams filled with native cutthroat trout
Juniper holy as Olive trees, Ponderosa mighty as Lebanon cedars
All growing by the rain, twisted by the wind
Under the same bright stars, rising-setting sun
And cosmic laws that make it all go round
Was Christ the Word already here flickering in the sky
Winking in the water
Alive in the heart of man made alive through the Spirit
God alone lights the candles and snuffs them out -
At the beginning and the end
And we tend to those between