advent journal: slouching towards bethlehem

2
1599

slouching towards bethlehem

yeats put pen to page last century
in the wake of a world war and
as his wife was recovering from
the pandemic before this one

we’ve since learned how to keep
the world at war without end
to live in sustainable exhaustion
and act as though we’re alive

easier to replace metaphor with
euphemism than to tell the truth
that we were killing each other by
incidental contact before COVID

I wonder as they traveled together
if either Mary or Joseph wished
out loud that life beyond Bethlehem
would be more than just going back

to normal to the same old Nazareth
or do I put words in their mouths
because I am not waiting to return
to normal to life before the virus

I’m barely going to make it to
Bethlehem in one piece as it is
wherever the road goes from there
needs to be somewhere other

than acting like we’ve learned
nothing other than it’s easier to
numb ourselves than to believe
we are all in this together

Peace,
Milton

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