Advent Visitation

"Full-term with light"

Luci Shaw passed this week at nearly 97, “full-term with light”, as she concludes the poem below. I have loved her poems for years and published so many on my blog, Witnesses to Hope. I recently reached out to her to tell her how much I love her poetry, and she sent me a lovely response. I will miss her.

This is one of her Advent poems.

Advent visitation

Even from the cabin window I sensed the wind’s
contagion begin to infect the rags of leaves.
Then the alders gilded to it, obeisant, the way

angels are said to bow, covering their faces with
their wings, not solemn, as we suppose, but
possessed of a sudden, surreptitious hilarity.

When the little satin wind arrived,
I felt it slide through the cracked-open door
(A wisp of prescience? A change in the weather?),

and after the small push of breath--You
entering with your sir of radiant surprise,
I the astonished one.

These still December mornings
I fancy I live in a clear envelope of angels
like a cellophane womb. Or a soap bubble,

the colors drifting, curling. Outside
everything’s tinted rose, grape, turquoise,
silver--the stones by the path, the skin of sun

on the pond ice, at night the aureola of
a pregnant moon, like me, irridescent,
almost full-term with light.