As per my annual tradition, the ebook of The Five Books of Jesus is set to free now and through the day after Christmas if you’d like to pick it up and read. Also wanted to share a Christmas poem from Let Me Drown with Moses, which I wrote years ago while my wife, Nicole, was expecting.
Christmas Eve
by James Goldberg
There's a dark line, by December, running
down from Mary's diaphragm and across her
navel, a dark line
on one of the darkest
days of the year
by which time she's
been carrying him
for nine long months.
Her feet ache
and her breasts ache
and her hands can barely grip anymore—
any minute the reins will slip through her thick fingers
and maybe she'll fall down off the donkey
and cry for a good long while
on the side of this dusty
distant, cramped
Judean road.
Joseph says this whole town is full to bursting,
and she just says, "I know."
He's trying to ask her opinion, wants her
to tell him what to do, she supposes, to
find a place to stay as night falls.
But Mary's brain has been flooded, washed
clean out, by the work of tending
her inside:
a secret place,
where her son can rest his head—
immersed in her water,
nourished by her blood.
If she can carry him
another mile
another hour
past just one more closed inn door,
then tonight
That great and terrible moment will come
when he bursts forth into this world
to teach us all
how to be born.