Annunciation, Coronation & Nativity

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Featured in New Lyre - Winter 2021

Annunciation 

Here in a bright alchemy, history 
collides and combines with eternal things. 
The mundane is infused with mystery, 
and the dust and mud and blood have wings. 

Here every moment of time is pregnant 
with meaning, every tick of the clock fecund 
with potential, and every tock significant— 
eternity bulging in every second. 
 
And so in this one afternoon in Spring 
as the light infuses the golden stone, 
the girl startled looks up from her weaving, 
and gasps in fear. She thought she was alone. 

But another being, as high and clear 
as the cosmos hovers there. All awhirl, 
the spirit spirals down from another sphere 
to magnify with light the little girl. 

Here the seen and unseen began to dance. 
The timeless took the time to enter time. 
Here all things gained a new significance,  
and the divine and human began to rhyme. 

Here flight was grounded— here the spiritual 
and the physical began to enmesh. 
And here omnipotence began to wrestle 
with the bloody reality of human flesh.