Advent Poetry Series “Star”

Though I’ve shared my own poems on the blog before, I always find it intimidating and I fear it’s presumptuous. (Nobody comes to this blog to read my poems, right?) But during Advent (I know, Advent doesn’t start till Sunday, but let’s just pretend), every Friday, I’ll share with you a series of poems I wrote two years ago, while I was pregnant with Brooksie. The poems were commissioned by John Knox Presbyterian Church in Seattle.

Star

“A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon 
under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”
   -Revelation 12:1

“…keep warm this small hot naked star/ fallen into my arms.”  -Luci Shaw, “Mary’s Song”

After the angel dissolved, I stood among the skies,
clothed not in spun linen, but in fire:
the sun’s silk my gown. I leaned into the swirl of gold and lit.

Have I created my Creator?

My mother clucks her tongue. Questions, she says,
cause confusion. She could never hold what I saw:

the crown on this plain brown head,
twelve stars in motion, set spinning like a child’s toy,
and rushing toward me, flames in its wake, blazed
the greater star, its hot white orb.

Should I tell you it entered me, how the warm simmer settled?

When I woke to this dirt floor, my mother’s voice
in the next room, issuing me out the door,
I ran my hands down my belly,
knew what is true is crown, not dirt.

Later, when the nausea churned, when the accusations
birthed, when all I loved turned enemy,
I stood in the garden, arms raised,
closed my eyes and let the spinning crown encircle me,
felt this star descend to human form.

© Micha Boyett. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or post without attribution.

Image Credit: Unknown Artist, Icon of the enthroned Virgin and Child with saints and angels, 6th Century (St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai, Egypt)