“Chains shall he break
For the slave is his brother”
Strange it should be
Our hope borne upon his shoulders
This child birthed
in a shepherds town
Could he really be the one they say
heals the plagues of man’s dominion:
Injustice, evil, and estrangement?
But how time has told
Violent chronicles of men
we and our children
need this child
For divisions breeding
Fear and forbidding
The freeing of the slaves
So, I heard it sang
In his name
all oppression shall cease
But it cannot be nominally
His name being more than a name
His law is love -his gospel peace
The marks of his reign
For In him- poor babe
The freedom of slaves
A family hewn from rubble
Strangers no longer estranged
brothers and sisters made
and bound to one another
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