‘the silence of God is God’
                                                — Carolyn Forché

the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
                        that opened all around Them.

i.  the idea

struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?

one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.
the other, murder and mayhem.
Cain and Abel.  Abraham and Isaac.
what came before the incarnation
was simply rehearsal, you strengthening your resolve.

the act of creation became an act of contrition,
guilt and remorse unfolding along a single line of time,
born in the ideation of a crucifixion and the death of God.

God treated as a common criminal, confused with thieves,
all because something once occurred to your Midas mind. 

ii.  Paradise

and there was the word,
the first word, last word
and all the words in between.
we were speechless.

I think of you, and I’m saddened.  
God, the unfortunate one, abandoned
by your image and likeness,
as if your own shadow walked away.

did your love begin narcissistically, an afterthought
born of a desire for companionship and recognition,         
a need to have your word heard?
were we all shaped by loneliness,
by your whim to unwind a filament of time
and create some other designs?

but the instant humans made that initial gesture,
that conscious reach of the hand;
when they grasped the inevitable,
exercised both reason and will,
and then began acting
in strange and unfamiliar ways;
the day they loved damp earth,
their beating hearts, flesh of their flesh —

from that day,
it was only a matter of time
before you made the change
                        and followed in their footsteps.

iii.  initial expectations:

what were you thinking?

when you were blind, existing
in darkness; deaf without sound; when nothing was
but you alone and a desire to get outside yourself.
your first thought brought angels,
in whom you saw yourself, a reflection.

only after all the other thinking and doing
did you imagine humankind: half animal,
then half God, something new even to you. 
did you expect that the first couple would be content
alone, with you their only companion, happy each day
in Paradise, same as every other day?
that they should command the world and all its creatures
live that simple reality in the same manner as beasts,
without knowledge, without that sense of morality   
born of judgment and choice, with no way to say
this is good, that is not, or any method to strive for one
and avoid the other?  how could they live that life,
rooting about the ground, their eyes cast down?

and what did you expect after they fell for fakery and deceit,
after they were ushered off the compound, even after
you again offered everlasting life — the first boon
lost in Paradise?

were you envious of humanity, their differences,
the physical feelings:  life in a world where the infusion
of bone and blood give all thought, all creation, new meaning?

it was never enough just to walk with Eve,
talk with Abraham or meet with Elijah. 
you wanted nothing less than incarnation: taste, touch, smell,
to be born, to live and die in the fullness of time. 
you yearned to be in flesh, feel the limits of skin,
to share their condition and understand the world    
not as you imagined it, but as they live it.           

iv.  a word on the mountain

Jesus!  the long-awaited manifestation.
if you’re starving, stones turn to bread. 
if you despair, even now,
and throw yourself from the precipice,
your father won’t let you die. 
                                                not yet.

besides, you’ve made promises
to the wretched and weak, modest and meek ¾
shadow dwellers who meet our eyes in squints
and steal a fearful glance, nothing more.
you have miracles to perform:  
water into wine, loaves and fishes, raising the dead.
some think you’re the answer to their prayers.

O, but he’ll want to bargain with you,
the way he did with Abraham and Moses,
demanding a human sacrifice. 

you’ll think he mocks you with flowers;
scorns you with majestic mountains;
sets your pallid, sallow anguish
against all the brilliant colors of earth,
marine blue and forest green;
arrays your half-fleshed blemish of sienna 
beside his crimson sunsets.

good lord, man!  you’ll beg to be spared the pain,
the torture, then seek the succor of humans,
concerned that our father may desert you.
worst of all, you know he thought of all this,
made it up, expecting you to explain, to justify it.

is it enough, to have the last word
and fulfill his deepest desire,
his longing to be human?

– John M. Davis