Delivery

In embered darkness, hours after birth,
my ear catching the baby’s feathered breath,
beside the manger, huddled on the earth

her sleeping form I watch. How close to death
this girl, this woman, mother, maiden, wife,
approached, on this bleak, brutal midnight blest,

a cave our only shelter, I midwife,
my reddened hands gripping her child divine,
delivering this miracle to life,

its body tangled in a thorny vine
of blood, and gentle Mary faintly screaming—
oh! I felt, would that the blood were mine.

She, later, holding him, young-aged eyes beaming,
kissed his brow and guessed the sorrow’s meaning.

© December 2015, Rachelle Ferguson