On a Christmas Pageant Day

They are eating clementines and practicing
riotous, illogical skips; I am in the yard,
cleaning up and noticing
how parenthood is given without regard
to who you are. Later, an angel

skips through the living room
on her way to church. There, in the
awkward dark, surrounded by cameras
and attentive close relations,
I see a heavenly host, none more than
four feet high and each unsure how to
wave her alleluia

while shepherds watch their parents, and behind,
the woman comforting her baby Jesus
is suddenly motherhood personified

and over all is felt perhaps by some at last
the possibility
of a kind and infant king.

December 14 2009