In Matthew’s gospel
Three sets of fourteen generations wait
for jubilee
– The final freeing of the slaves.
Will the debt that buries
the brow of every seed of Eve
in sweat and blood be paid?
Will the exiles be brought back
-and restored?
The mystery of the jubilee of jubilees.
Seventy-times-seven and terribly broken,
turned aside, and rancid.
Will even the bones dance at this jubilee of
jubilees?
Who can pay the debt of bones?
They were waiting then and we are waiting
now -though not quite the same for
jubilee.
The rest of the poems from Rusten Harris’s Advent series on Moss Kingdom:
Incarnation, Christmas Eve, Kings, Some Kind of Glory, Chains, Gifts, Quotidian Couple, A Thousand Lights, Eve & Mary, Treasured Up, Christmas, Winter Staves, The Glorias, Cherubim, Joseph, Strange Redeemer, Womb, Magi, Temple Trough, Advent, Lord’s Day, Far as the Curse is Found, Jubilee, The Massacre of the Innocents, Liturgical Time
Other Advent poems on Moss Kingdom:
December 21: an Advent poem for the Winter Solstice, Of Edmund and Aslan, Tiptoe Hope, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats