Feeling Healing

After his birth in a stable, like an animal,
the people in his neighborhood call him a bastard.
He is an unwelcomed, cursed, outcast.
But he loves like domestic animals love.
When his parents tell him the story
of shepherds adoring him after he was born
he remembers that love
is as healing
as cuddling a lamb.

**

When the king hears that a miraclous child is born
he tries to kill the boy
by murdering all the children in the neighborhood.
The boy escapes to Egypt, with the trauma of knowing
that his body and blood, in birth as in conception, causes catastrophe.
In Egypt, a stranger in a strange land,
he begins to learn that a carpenter has freeing hands.

**

When his parents travel to Jerusalem for the Passover Seder,
he scares them by remaining in Jerusalem,
while they journey home.
After searching for three days
they are shocked to find him teaching elders in the temple
about our guide in the skies.
who he claims is his real father.