CHRISTMAS STARS
Blazes the star behind the hill.
Snow stars glint from the wooden sill.
A spider spins her silver still
within Your darkened stable shed;
in asterisks her webs are spread
to ornament Your manger bed.
Where does a spider find the skill
to sew a star? Invisible,
obedient, she works Your will
with her swift silences of thread.
I weave star poems in my head;
the spider, wordless, spins instead.
Luci Shaw
Advent
BY MARY JO SALTER
Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until
it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down
to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned—then glad
to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.
Look, in my surprise
I somehow split a wall,
the last one in the house
we’re making of gingerbread.
We’ll have to improvise:
prop the two halves forward
like an open double door
and with a tube of icing
cement them to the floor.
Five days until Christmas,
and the house cannot be closed.
When she peers into the cold
interior we’ve exposed,
she half-expects to find
three magi in the manger,
a mother and her child.
She half-expects to read
on tablets of gingerbread
a line or two of Scripture,
as she has every morning
inside a dated shutter
on her Advent calendar.
She takes it from the mantel
and coaxes one fingertip
under the perforation,
as if her future hinges
on not tearing off the flap
under which a thumbnail picture
by Raphael or Giorgione,
Hans Memling or David
of apses, niches, archways,
cradles a smaller scene
of a mother and her child,
of the lidded jewel-box
of Mary’s downcast eyes.
Flee into Egypt, cries
the angel of the Lord
to Joseph in a dream,
for Herod will seek the young
child to destroy him. While
she works to tile the roof
with shingled peppermints,
I wash my sugared hands
and step out to the deck
to lug the shutter in,
a page torn from a book
still blank for the two of us,
a mother and her child.
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