THIS FIRE MUST BURN: A CHRISTMAS POEM

 

 

THIS FIRE MUST BURN: A CHRISTMAS POEM

 

No light shines that is not itself a road/ No other door opens except in dreams.---From “In Dreams” by Simeon Dumdum, Jr.

 

This fire must burn fiercely to build the road

that ends at the foundling’s darkened cavern.  

Blind eyes will discover how only hearts can

find where the flame has been lit to crackle  

through endless nights of endless dreaming

for an advent that is also the final leaving:  

How long will this journey take to open doors

that will take him in? Why are they all closed?  

A peasant woman and her bewildered lover,

huddle around a trough of dampened feed,  

and cannot hear their fears drowned by hope

that their wildest nightmare of an unborn  

child would be a prince of peace whose light

is all he could offer the wounded and the poor.  

For these afflicted, the light will all be roads,

to his kingdom where dreams are also doors  

to a bountiful garden carved from twin hills

of birth and crucifixion. Bethlehem is Calvary.  

 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA